Performative trolling or sincere conviction? Credit: X / @DollPariah
Twenty-six-year-old Miles Yardley — formerly known in downtown New York City as a musician, influencer, and model named Salomé — publicly renounced his trans identity this year, sold his women’s clothing online, and began posting grim details to his 20,000 or so followers on X about how his medical transition as a teenager has affected his body over the past decade. Yardley is a microcelebrity — as Salomé, he modeled for fashion brands Elena Velez and Batsheva, and he’s currently auditioning for a show on HBO. His detransition was, in part, spurred by another micro-celebrity, the alt-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, with whom Yardley is sharing a house in Los Angeles. Yiannopoulos now claims to be “ex-gay” and has launched Tarantula, a talent agency for scandal-plagued celebrities; Yardley is a Tarantula client. Yardley also says he’s ex-gay and is undergoing a form of conversion therapy — a branch of therapy as debunked as possible in a changing world — and has made a public embrace of Roman Catholicism.
Given the politics and personalities involved, it’s tempting to accuse both men of being as deliberately offensive as possible — even to Roman Catholics, who won’t love the performative and irreligious tone of their materials. And as one straight man I know said, Yiannopoulos’s and Yardley’s new trad-bromance “looks pretty gay”. Yet Yardley seems to represent an incipient trend. He is one of a handful of detransitioners I personally know of who have turned toward Catholicism’s restrictive sexual dogmas (still no blowjobs, folks) and teachings on biological sex in order to change their lives.
While not all insights gained from the experience of being trans and back again are reliable — especially when staged for an online public — their voices are worth hearing for what they reveal about the so-called vibe shift, a younger generation’s turn away from sexual-liberationist paradigms, and the role of Christianity in it. This, even as the attention-seeking quality of their discourse recalls nothing so much as the gender trend just a few years ago — only now in the opposite direction.
Yardley is of the first generation of young people to launch their medical transition during puberty as part of the Tumblr-fueled gender revolution, and believes he will face permanent fertility consequences as a result. He says that he was a feminine-looking boy, who liked female things and had mostly female friends, and who was often misgendered. He didn’t know why he was different, but “other people informed me of it”. Around the time Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way” came out, in 2011, he wondered if being transgender might be the answer. He went to the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and says he was rushed into transgender care. The therapist recommended by the clinic “immediately bought into it that I was really a girl”.
Today, he is graceful, tall, and girlish in photos, and easily passes as a biological woman. But he has grown to regret his transition for a host of what are becoming the usual reasons: concerns about how cross-sex hormones were affecting his health; physical pain; fatigue with what other detransitioners have called “trans OCD”, an obsessional focus on one’s body; and a dawning realisation that the desire for transgenderism spawned from an original mental-health issue that being transgender wasn’t fixing. “I was never comfortable with it,” Yardley tells me.
Like some male-to-female transitioners, he says that at least part of his attempt to become a woman was in order to cope with same-sex feelings of attraction without having to declare himself as gay. He now objects to the characterisation of sexual orientation as a fixed and immutable identity. He also rejects the idea that being a feminine boy meant he was actually a girl. “Gay and trans are the same thing”, he tells me. “Both result from an original trauma to your gender that can be healed”.
It’s fairly easy to diagnose a swing from one utopian extreme to another, which comments like that exemplify. But it’s less easy to dismiss the critique of categories of sexual identity and sexual orientation, acknowledged by scholars on both the Left and the Right to be a fairly recent invention. For most of human history, as Michel Foucault pointed out, heterosexuality or homosexuality did not exist as identities; both were invented in the late 19th century as a means of normalising heterosexual behavior, while treating same-sex-attracted people as “abnormal”. That the invention turned on its makers and ended up providing the grounds for gay liberation is one of history’s delicious ironies. Today’s proliferation of increasingly niche identities and orientations, and the practice of changing them as a person evolves, supports the argument that these identities aren’t as hard-and-fast as they appear.
Some of the excesses of Yardley’s and Yiannopoulos’s publicly performed hard-Right Catholicism seem like they could be trolling. But Yardley’s explanation over the telephone sounds heartfelt. He was raised nominally Catholic, he says, and as early as 2020, when it became clear to him that being trans wasn’t making him happier or more socially comfortable, he began to research dissenting opinions. A Catholic priest was the first person ever, he says, to tell him something most human beings have believed throughout history — “No, you’re a man, and you can’t get out of it.”
Another outspoken detransitioner, Ray Alex Williams, has run a YouTube channel on the subject since 2023, and published an essay on Substack on 24 February headlined, “How Catholicism Solved My Autogynephilia Problem.” Williams’s essay begins with the acknowledgement that people will think he has “gone off the deep end” and has gone “from one extreme cult to another”. During a follow-up phone conversation, he reveals that he isn’t officially Catholic yet; his religious-conversion experience is fewer than two weeks old; and his girlfriend broke up with him over it. The headline, in this case, seems like a deliberate distortion in a bid for clicks. However, as he tells it, his “desperate search for moral clarity” has been years in the making, and he believes he needs such clarity to help him combat the destructive role his sexual desires have played in his life.
Autogynephilia, or AGP, is contested cultural territory. Defined by the eminent Canadian sexologist Ray Blanchard as “a man’s paraphilic tendency to be sexually aroused by the thought or image of himself as a woman”, it generally involves not just the erotic desire to be a woman, but accompanying fantasies of being used and abused for being female, often these days following the tropes of the “sissy” subgenre of pornography.
When they don’t deny autogynephilia altogether, transgender activists object to the term because it pathologises the set of sexual desires it describes, and opens the door to the claim that trans people with these desires are not women, but just men with an obsessive paraphilia. (Yardley explicitly disavows AGP as having had any role in his experience.) One thing is certain, though: the set of desires itself is fairly common.
New York magazine books critic Andrea Long Chu has been open that such impulses fueled her transition, and discussed how sissy porn shaped her identity in remarks at the New York Public Library in 2018. Chu said that she started watching “a lot” of pornography as a middle-school boy, and described a progression in her tastes from “run-of-the-mill, mainstream pornography” to “JOI” (jerk-off instruction) videos, in which a female performer demeans the male viewer. From there, Chu “went down a humiliation track … until I hit sissy porn…. My porn addiction had all along been waiting for something like sissy porn … because now if I’m reading in retrospect, the whole thing was about trying to access a kind of sexuality that wasn’t about being a man”. Trans actress and Euphoria star Hunter Schaefer wrote along similar lines in a now-deleted Instagram post the same year: “My sexual orientation was not gay. It was not straight. Nor pan. It was an attraction, is an attraction, always, to misogyny. My gender was SO influenced by a need to be used by men.”
Detransitioner Williams chronicles a lifelong struggle with a similar set of feelings and desires, which led him to transition to female in 2015, at the age of 28. He says he didn’t have “an underlying predisposition to hate my male body”, though that started after he became trans. Williams lived as a woman for eight years, which he says decreased the sexually fetishistic aspects of his behavior (and his libido), but had other negative consequences, such as extreme social anxiety. He also, in 2020, developed a pulmonary embolism and almost died, he says, which he attributes to taking cross-sex hormones. Attempts to detransition and manage his resurgent AGP in a healthy way, along lines suggested by Phil Illy’s book Autoheterosexual: Attracted to Being the Other Sex, were a failure, despite finding a bisexual, kink-positive partner who accepted his sexuality.
The activist stance on these desires is that they are neutral in themselves and can be considered a sexual orientation, and that any negative consequences come from social stigmatisation. Williams’s experience could bear that out. Despite finding willing partners and accepting circles, he continued to feel shame, confusion, and social discomfort from his gender urges and sexual practices. However, he also found that indulging his desires oriented him towards masturbation and away from his partner, and that his desires followed patterns of other addictions in his life, requiring ever-greater stimulus for diminishing rewards, and ultimately bringing unhappiness instead of pleasure.
One day, high on cannabis — another persistent addiction struggle, he writes — and ready to engage in his fetish, Williams had the revelation that both his marijuana smoking and his sexual behavior were self-destructive and pathological in the same way, and had to stop. “Immediately”, he writes, he had the desire to get back into religion, which he had experimented with before on his detransition journey, but this time, he was drawn to Catholicism, specifically for its intensity of pageantry and ritual and its strict sexual doctrine. He understands that his new convictions might seem suspect or “mentally unstable”, he says, but he now believes that the inner voice of shame and disgust that he hasn’t been able to silence has a transcendental cause, and is distinguishing a fundamental right from wrong.
Not all of the new detransitioners are drawn by Christianity’s oldest branch. Sierra Weir, 37, who goes by the name Exulansic on X and Substack, has since 2021 devoted herself since to exposing the ugly side of the gender trend, for simpler but similar reasons of mental and physical health. Weir did a double-major in gender studies and linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, and says she was once “really into” transgenderism. She transitioned medically to male when she was 23 but began to have ideological disagreements with the trans orthodoxies and experienced harmful and dangerous health outcomes from hormone therapy. She says she now has osteopenia (low bone density, a precursor to osteoporosis) which is a known risk factor with Depo Provera, which she took to suppress menstruation, and she has been recently diagnosed with lumbar degeneration, which she believes is related. She is vituperative against her former doctors, whom she believes misdiagnosed her and exacerbated her problems. “It just ruined my life”, she says.
Weir’s social media channels circulate lurid news items about crimes by transgender women, and frequently discuss suicides by distressed transgender people all genders and ages — material that can legitimately be read as stigmatising for transgender people seeking public acceptance. She also writes and films disturbing stories on mostly biological female victims of terrible mental and physical health outcomes and botched surgeries. However, she says, “I’m not against individual people who are trans, and I have a great deal of compassion and empathy. I’m speaking out because I don’t want harm to come to them.” (She may or may not now be on the right side of history, but once again, it’s the scare tactics of the original trans movement: if we don’t all believe this right now, people will die.)
In addition to believing that hormones and surgeries are physically risky and damaging in ways people aren’t told about, she believes that cross-sex hormones can cloud a person’s thinking — making them more likely to opt for risky procedures — and exacerbate previous mental health issues. “The hormones were affecting my ability to think and my ability to remember”, she says. Having detransitioned, she feels like “I don’t have brain fog anymore.” She believes that people suffering from gender dysphoria from any of these conditions “deserve to have optimal health and to understand their predicament”, and that medical providers are “abdicating that responsibility.”
Prior to Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, now X, Weir was “being banned from all platforms of note”, she says. Now she’s free to critique the movement she was once a part of, and with the same zeal. Yardley, for his part, attributes the wave of detransitioners not to the vibe shift or a trend, but merely to the passage of time. It’s been several years since the transgender tipping point, he says, and people have “passed that first sense of euphoria that people get from accomplishing any goal” and begun to have doubts. “So many people are detransitioning because so many people transitioned”, he says. That conclusion, as least, sounds reasonable, and like something we should be open to learning from.
But let’s hope the pendulum doesn’t merely swing from one brand of performative conviction to another. The Roman church, in addition to its prohibition of most sexual acts, asks adherents to cultivate lives of silence, contemplation, and prayer. Those who have embraced the Church as a refuge from online ideologies might want to take up these practices — instead of plunging head-long into the next e-mania.
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SubscribeI have the impression that the author is neither Roman Catholic, nor knows very many.
There is absolutely no requirement to spend a life in silent prayer, and most sexual acts between a married couple are celebrated, not prohibited. Catholicism is not monasticism, unless one wants to enter a religious order, and very few do. Both the Bidens and the Kennedys are, at least nominally and not very devoutly, Roman Catholic, as are both France and Brazil. And much of New Orleans.
Perhaps because many other Christian denominations are either so devoid of ritual and history that they’re sterile and joyless, or are so permissive as to be little more than an ideology, the Church retains its ancient appeal to those marooned by bizarre modernity.
The author is, indeed, Catholic. And she isn’t saying that these figures should literally enter the monastic life. The point is that, having damaged their lives with performative online hyperactivity, it would behoove them to perhaps seek out a calmer, less online approach–at least, until they figure things out. Her concern is that they went from e-performing gender to e-performing Catholicism.
For all the concern about swinging pendulums, somehow a rapid transition from performative online hyperactivity to performative online inactivity always receives uncritical endorsement…
Can you ever be honest Amari? She’s a recent convert, one whose conversion was also fairly performative and which you covered in your Peter Thiel sponsored magazine.
Why shouldn’t people who live online post the other half of their story? If they’ve already narrated the fall, why not the redemption? It seems just to me. Possibly even a way for them to right their wrongs. Lest their former writings stand alone and become scandal.
I agree with you about Catholicism but I think you’ve misunderstood the author’s reference to it.
She’s a recent convert. Also performative, imho. As well as the man below who commented. All Peter Thiel projects meant to make the Catholic Church and Catholics the eventual brunt of world hate or make the Church pro-Zionist (which it is not).
I had the same thoughts reading this article. I’ll also suspect the author is British or hasn’t spent over a month in any location more than a hundred miles from an ocean, because to most middle Americans, this sounds like utter nonsense for multiple reasons. I have been around and known Catholics my entire life and my brother even married one. Most protestant versions of Christianity are more restrictive than Catholicism in terms of behavior, sometimes much more, particularly the puritan varieties that figure into early American history and helped shape American culture. To a non-American, think Victorian sensibilities on steroids backed up by the Old Testament wrath of God rather than what the neighbors will think. There’s still quite a lot of that in rural America to the extent that anyone who talks about Catholics like they’re driving the prohibition bus will likely be suspected of falling off the wagon themselves. Prohibition was very much a protestant thing, as were most of the puritanical beliefs the author seems to misattribute to Catholicism. At one time and in certain areas, Democrats were denounced as the party of “rum, romanism, and rebellion”, referring respectively to their opposition to prohibition, their Catholicism, and their association with the south after the Civil War. This is still a thing where I live in Bible Belt America, where my county finally allowed alcohol sales about ten years ago. It wasn’t Catholics voting against the booze referendum, I’ll tell you, and frankly many of the people who did keep the county ‘dry’ would tell you the same, a handful quite loudly whether you asked or not. The counties with larger Catholic populations by and large either got rid of their prohibition a long time ago or never had it to start with. Needless to say, from my background, this articles sounds like utter nonsense. If these online de-transitioners wanted to find a ridiculous, cultish, needlessly restrictive religious denomination, I can refer them to several better candidates, at least if they’re willing to leave New York/Los Angeles.
Oh my god, what a load of nonsense. Not the writer. The content of this type of ‘condition’, ‘disphoria’ or whatever. Meaningless terminology.
We have male and female – 2 sexes.
We have 2 sexual orientation – same sex and opposite sex attraction. You will shout at me now for saying this – there is no such thing as a bisexual. Really! I know. Bisexual men are gay. Bisexual women are straight who bounce back and forth for security.
Now that’s out of the way – trans are just a fad, a crutch and an excuse all their mental illnesses.
It’s highly unlikely that trans is wholly a fad – though it might be in part. It is present across cultures and across history.
Whether it becomes “faddish” at particular times, such as our own is an interesting question. Camille Paglia associates gender bending of various kinds with decadence.
But like homosexuality it does just seem to be part of the normal human pattern. A certain number of people just do not conform to the norms for their sex.
Not conforming to sexist stereotypes of ‘gender’ is not ‘trans’ – it is the opposite. Most people are already ‘gender non-conforming’ – being ‘trans’ is simply to conform to the gender imposed on the opposite sex.
First you’re begging the question in claiming that gender is imposed.
But second, however you want to frame it, people have been identifying with the opposite sex throughout history and across cultures. That is, they have been trans. You really don’t get much more non-conforming than that.
Surely transgenderism or being trans is part of transhumanism which suggests that human beings can use technology, including medicine, to alter bodily structure and function beyond biological constraints or limits. Being trans means that an individual can escape their sex and can literally become the opposite sex. Obviously, this is impossible, and yet trans people and activists will insist that this happens, hence the mantra ‘trans women are women and trans men are men’. Didn’t the great thinker David Lammy say that trans women i.e. men, can grow a cervix? Ridiculous, but there it is.
This is different to how people, who did not or do not conform to societal expectations, such as cross dressing or affecting certain mannerisms for example, have been seen by societies past and present. They may be accepted to varying extents, but everyone, even the individuals themselves would say that they haven’t changed sex and that they are something separate or distinct from men and women. They certainly wouldn’t refer to themselves as transgender or trans, which I think is a fairly recent, late 20th /early 21st century term.
There’s a short hand version of all of this trans verbiage.
Trans and all of it’s associated hyperbole, it’s paraphernalia is mental illness, sexual deviancy and spectrum mental frameworks..
Fundamentally if you think you are a women, whilst in possession of all your male genitalia from birth, then you are mentally ill.
Society should treat these people as severely mentally ill people and not indulge them.
What would treating them as such involve? Ostracisation, criminal penalties, corrective therapy? I agree with you to extent that believing you are in the wrong body and can switch to another is delusional. I see a related madness in extreme transhumanists. There’s claimable space between instant total indulgence and mockery or exile from society for a child who, for example, is a confused and very feminine 12-year-old boy.
Forgive me for wondering whether you consider homosexuality itself or boys/men wearing makeup to be a “severe mental illness”* I don’t guess you do, but I think it’s necessary to avoid overcorrection toward some nostalgic ideal of a time which demonized “queer” thoughts and criminalized homosexual behavior among adults.
I can’t personally understand why adult males would feel the need to dress as women, let alone take hormonal or surgical measures to alter themselves. But if they foot their own “transition bills” I don’t think it needs to be denounced, or made fully understandable to someone like me. There are also, I’ve heard, about one in 500 people who have some intersex features at birth, with a smaller subset where it’s hard for doctors to tell the difference. To be clear, I think gender-change hormones and surgery should be administered no more than rarely, and off-limits to minors.
*or whether group-labeling them as such helps anyone in the long run. From the most severe and unforgiving point of view, I’d wager that close to a majority of us have a “severe” mental illness, whether of the chronic or acute kind, at one point in our lives. Such as depression, extreme social withdrawal, psychotic rage, or body dysmorphia. It might help to be told that we’re out of minds—but only as a wake up call, followed by help. And not if it’s not intended to help at all, except as a convenient dismissal by the one making such an amateur blanket diagnosis.
Ah, the intersex conundrum which isn’t a conundrum at all. If a Y sex chromosome is present in the genome, then that individual is a genetic male; no Y sex chromosome means the individual is a genetic female, confusing physical features not withstanding. Simple.
Incidentally, the term intersex is no longer used, probably because of the confusion it seems to generate. Disorder of sex development or DSD is the preferred term which makes things much clearer. People sometimes refer to differences or variations of sex development. The gist is still the same, but disorder of sex development is preferred.
First, I don’t pretend to be an expert on this—perhaps you’re not either. I didn’t use “intersex” but I didn’t know it had been retired. The genetic standard could be valid, but still with exceptions I think.
I met a person who told me he was born with both parts but forcibly, surgically “made” female soon after birth. In a relationship with a normal woman*, he was taking hormones (he had a beard and looked like a boyish but not feminine young man) and looking to get a “phalloplasty”. By the way this person was just a friendly acquaintance who volunteered this info, which I would not have guessed. He worked at a grocery store I frequent and took a piece of furniture I was gonna donate. Not that you asked for any of that info, I’m just saying that— in my own firm opinion—the hardcore, no exceptions stances on either side of the dispute are mistaken. I tend to side with the center/right on this issue, but don’t consider it to be a “one size fits all” thing.
*by which I mean a “standard biological issue” woman—she drove the car that this literally emasculated man and I loaded the free recliner into, from my third floor apartment. My sample-size-of-one impression of her is that she was good looking but kind of a b i t c h. Then again, not everyone likes old AJ—they never have. Just more anecdotal flavor you didn’t request. Back to your previous certainties then, if you insist.
“Gay and trans are the same thing”, he tells me.
He may not be entirely wrong.
While trying to reduce the one to the other may be reductionist, trying to split the two apart as distinct concepts may not reflect reality. There is much overlap, and both involve a failure to conform to the (social or biological) norms for one’s sex.
There is something “trans” in the broad sense about both effeminate gay men and masculine presenting lesbians, and homosexuality and transvestism have long been associated.
“But it’s less easy to dismiss the critique of categories of sexual identity and sexual orientation, acknowledged by scholars on both the Left and the Right to be a fairly recent invention. For most of human history, as Michel Foucault pointed out, heterosexuality or homosexuality did not exist as identities; both were invented in the late 19th century as a means of normalising heterosexual behavior, while treating same-sex-attracted people as “abnormal”. That the invention turned on its makers and ended up providing the grounds for gay liberation is one of history’s delicious ironies.”
Come on, this is so misleading. Acts of homosexuality have been severely punished in European culture for over a 1,000 years. From, burning, to castration, to dismemberment and execution, the punishments for same-sex attracted people have been extreme. Homosexual acts were NEVER considered normal within Christian culture. And I know the author’s claim refers to identities, but that in itself is a more modern phenomenon across every form of society as philosophical beliefs moved away from collectivism through to individualism. People from medieval Europe would have no more felt the need for separate sexual identities than we would feel the need for separate identities for those that like having hands and those that would like to cut them off. One was THE way, the other was an insane perversion.
On this, as on mental illness and much else, Foucault was most likely simply wrong.
Even in ancient Athens, where homosexual relations between men and boys were pretty much normalised (at least for the upper class) such relations between two adult males were generally mocked. This was especially the case for passive homosexuality.
Yes, and just because the ancients behaved as they did sexually does not mean that their behaviour cannot be questioned. They did not have the psychological insight that developed in later times. Michel Foucault’s denial of this suited his own purposes, and was not a great unravelling of misunderstanding.
“From one extreme to another”
But where, in the article, is this other extreme we were promised?
And what is the implied golden mean?
If trans ideology is wrong, then it is not extreme to reject it completely.
But the author does indeed label as “extreme” those who reject it publicly (even where they speak from personal knowledge after spending years as “trans”). Would she like them to keep quiet about their low-bone density, about the suicide rate among post-operative “trans” people and so on? Why does she regard this behaviour as “extreme”?
So, since the author thinks that public rejection of trans ideology is extreme, then she cannot consistently think that trans ideology is extreme. She may, at most, think that an “extreme” presentation of trans ideology has driven people away, and that the selling of the ideology should proceed more slowly and less “performatively” (her word), so that it can gain assent across society.
As a separate (if related) issue, Catholics are supposed to accept converts who were previously leading very different lives – they can keep extravagant behaviour that is not in itself wrong, and the only requirement is that they make an effort to cease behaviour that is wrong, and that they don’t continue promoting such behaviour. Now, there’s always a chance that their supposed conversion is cosplaying, but that will become apparent over time, and even then, they may gradually replace the image with the reality. What a Catholic is not supposed to do is assume that the conversion (or reversion) is false – that is uncharitable.
I was raised Catholic and stayed Catholic until I was 30, attending Mass weekly, so I can see why the Catholic Church – with as one person said “its pageantry” – would appeal to detransitioners. Because transgenderism and its ideology is a religion, it makes sense to replace it with another religion. In many ways, trans is a gross bastardization of Catholicism – the “transubstantiation” of the gendered soul, the duality/trinity of souls within a person. That pernicious aspect of it has always seemed particularly childish and offensive to me. Even the flags are an Advent like caricature.
However, if these young people really want to find substantive, sustaining answers, they need create a relationship with God, not substitute one cult for another. I am not saying they can’t be Catholic – although I am no longer Catholic. What more proof do you need of a cult than people who stay in an organization after the mass rape of children is revealed? But it’s only in true relationship with Christ that you can find truth, safety, and love.
Finally, I find it ironic, the writer fears religion as a overreaction to the trans cult and the sexually amorphic mess that is the world today. Antibiotic resistant syphilis, Monkey pox, commercials touting that you can have unprotected sex with HIV if you are on medication – what about other STIs? Young women submitting to choking during sex because it’s normalized in Teen Vogue. Polycules, furries, etc. Pornography everywhere – available online to children.
I don’t think it’s possible to overcorrect enough! We are literally heading to hell in a handbasket.
Christianity is not the problem here.
Thank you. Spot on, although tbf the actual numbers of priest pedos is no different (actually statistically lower than, if by degrees) than teachers, sports coaches, and leaders of other faiths so we aren’t super culty. The Church and its earthly sinning members is not the Faith and its credos.
How is fetishing a woman as nothing more than a collection of orifices to be penetrated in abusive ways (Chu) some kind of genuine or marginalised sexuality that should be accepted in public life?
There *is* such a thing as society and to have one, we all have to agree that a certain amount of anti-social behaviours should be unacceptable in public life. Men larping as women is one such.
EXACTLY and THANK YOU!
When the Left goes too far in society, “it’s Religion’s fault!”
I think this is key to the regret or at least disappointment many transitioners are bound to feel: “an obsessional focus on one’s body; and a dawning realisation that the desire for transgenderism spawned from an original mental-health issue that being transgender wasn’t fixing”.
Right. A more profound sense of not belonging or unwillingness to accept one’s life is usually at work. With a social contagion like “gender affirmation”, alienated youngsters are likelier to attribute major adolescent angst to misgendering by God (if you will). There was investigative reporting about multiple affluent schools where about half of all the biological girls had decided they were male or non-binary. That’s like an inverted conformity at that point.