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.

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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 goaded 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 realization 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 characterization 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 normalizing 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 pathologizes 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.”

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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 stigmatization. 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 stigmatizing 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.)

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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 too-certain 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 performative mania.

By the time I became aware of her, in 2014, she had become notorious in circles where sex research and journalism overlap. What appears to have curdled her is the work of Ray Blanchard, the sex researcher who proposed the theory of autogynephilia, which posits that some trans women are motivated to transition by sexual arousal at the thought of being a woman. It is seen by some trans people as offensive because, in their view, it pathologises and/or sexualises their identity. An apparently smaller group of individuals, most famously Anne Lawrence, believe it accurately describes their own experiences.

Back in the Noughties, Blanchard and the psychology professor J. Michael Bailey — who popularised Blanchard’s ideas in his 2003 book The Man Who Would Be Queen — became the subjects of a smear campaign that, whatever one thinks of the theory, became abusive. Andrea James was one of the worst offenders. Her behaviour has been well-documented by the medical historian and bioethicist Alice Dreger, who in a 2006 blog post observed that “Ms. James was notable for the way she decided to go after Bailey’s children to extract revenge. She posted on the internet photographs of Bailey’s daughter and labeled her a ‘cock-starved exhibitionist.’”

After she published her blog post, Dreger described in an update how James sent a series of hostile emails, including one referring to her five-year-old son as a ‘precious womb turd’: “She also came to my departmental office (I was not there) and then emailed me, subject line ‘Mommy Knows Best,’ saying, ‘Sorry I missed you the other day. Your colleagues seem quite affable, and not as fearful as you. […] Bad move, Mommy. […] We’ll chat in person soon’.”

These incidents are described in more detail in Dreger’s book Galileo’s Middle Finger, published in 2015, by which point James’s influence appears to have waned. I began reporting on youth gender medicine around that time, and I didn’t get any sense that other prominent transactivists, or LGBT groups, took James seriously. Her name didn’t come up as someone you should talk to, if you wanted to better understand these issues. So why, a few years ago, did she experience a partial reversal in her fortunes?

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It all started in 2018, when The Atlantic published a cover story about the debate over youth gender transition — written by me. The story included quotes from a number of people, including teens, who explained how profoundly transitioning had benefited them. However, it also included quotes from detransitioners, and dug into some of the controversy over youth transition. James was outraged that I would shine a light on the subject’s nuances, trade-offs and difficult questions. From some trans activists’ points of view, it is settled science that youth gender medicine works — indeed, saves lives. To suggest otherwise is heresy.

Because of that view, plenty of people criticised the article, some harshly. But James’s response was something else. She was so outraged that she launched a Kickstarter called “The Transphobia Project”. It went live about a year after the publication of my article — which, in the FAQ section, she called “one of the most disgraceful moments in American journalism this century”, and credited with motivating her entire endeavour. As for the endeavour itself, she described it as “an interactive data visualization of the platforms and people creating biased content about gender identity and expression”. James explained how it would work: “Any time someone publishes media on these topics, a score called a t-index is generated for that work. That t-index also gets applied to the creator, any co-authors or editors, the platform where it appeared, and the organizations that support that platform. … Those with a high t-index become more prominent on the chart.”

And yet, nowhere on her Kickstarter does James clarify how her system would determine someone’s transphobia. Indeed, “appearing on the chart does not necessarily mean a person or organisation is transphobic.” In fact, if you look past the various buzzwords, it’s very hard to figure out what, exactly, the then-proposed project would do, other than show how various writers and editors are connected via the publications they work for (hardly a state secret). Yet despite the vagueness of The Transphobia Project’s actual, well, project, James enthuses on her fundraising appeal that it “will help us identify and expose bias, and maybe even get a few people fired along the way!”

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When The Transphobia Project’s Kickstarter launched, Donald Trump was still president, and liberal institutions were understandably preoccupied with his frequently ugly attempts to get journalists harassed and fired. James’s project didn’t hide the fact that it had similar goals, but, perhaps because James was going to target morally bad journalists for harassment and firing, rather than morally good ones, a cohort of progressives decided to hold her up as a champion in the noble fight against transphobia.

Kickstarter, for example, highlighted The Transphobia Project on its “featured projects” page, and published an article about it in the official Kickstarter Magazine by Rebecca Hiscott. In Axios, the respected tech writer Ina Fried published an article headlined, “Exclusive: Using data to track transphobia in media”. It was effectively a press release. The website Journalism.co.uk published a similarly hagiographic writeup by Daniel Green, which was subsequently promoted by Harvard’s Nieman Lab, one of the most important media-criticism institutions in the country.

None of the articles mentioned that the woman they were championing had once publicly called her enemy’s young daughter a “cock-starved exhibitionist”. None reached out to me for comment, despite James noting that my article had inspired the whole project (though Green, to be fair, posted part of my response at the bottom of his article after I complained). Nor did they interrogate James’s self-professed credentials. (I contacted all the authors — as well as Mike Allen, cofounder of Axios — to ask why they had failed to dig up James’s history of intimidating behaviour, and whether they planned any followup. I didn’t hear back from any, save for a brief note from a Journalism.co.uk editor who didn’t respond to my queries except to note that they wouldn’t be writing about James further.)

A close read of James’s proposal, combined with knowledge of her background, raised serious questions about whether she had the experience or technical chops necessary to pull off The Transphobia Project. And yet various outlets produced prime examples of a growing genre of journalism, geared not at establishing the truth, but at showing you’re on the right side of a raging controversy.

Probably partly because of this coverage, James’s fundraising was successful: 252 backers provided her with $23,302, more than ten times her $2,000 goal. The estimated delivery date, still visible on her Kickstarter, was July 2019. More than four years on, the Transphobia Project still doesn’t exist, and there is no sign James will deliver on her nebulous promises.

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But even if The Transphobia Project remains unrealised, James has been busy. In the past four years, she has vastly expanded and updated her website, Transgender Map. And what she has added is not more data analysis of transphobic networks, but rather shockingly detailed webpages on what appears to be every enemy she has accumulated in recent years — an ever-growing list. These pages include personal information not only about them, but also about family members who are almost always wholly uninvolved in the fight over sex and gender.

The page dedicated to one editor at a mainstream site — who doesn’t appear to ever have written anything about transgender issues, but has edited pieces James dislikes — not only lists their spouse’s name but is, in fact, one of the spouse’s top Google results. The journalist Helen Lewis, a friend of mine, said that her page initially included photos from her first wedding, which James took from Flickr. When Lewis made the page private, James noted the change. Indeed, she seems to keep a very close eye on how her victims respond to their pages. Many of the entries also include caricatures that James has commissioned, likely at considerable cost, given the sheer number of them. In one of the creepiest cases I found, James commissioned a cartoon of not only my podcast co-host, Katie Herzog, but also her wife, who is unconnected to any of this. UnHerd also has its own page, listing many of its contributors and editors.

Many of the people featured have been deeply disturbed by it. “Does anyone know who runs the TransgenderMap website?” asked Prisha S, a detransitioner, on Twitter. “There are web pages about detransitioners with personal info and hate. The page about me is the longest. Whoever runs it seems to hate me a lot. It’s freaky, honestly. Can anything be done?”

Being featured didn’t really bother me initially. But I did become concerned when I received an upset email from my brother asking why the site was showing up near the top of his search results. It transpires James had compiled the most detailed biography of me that exists on the internet, the vast majority of which had nothing to do with my output on youth gender transition. Bringing my family into her perceived conflict with me crossed what felt like a line that would be obvious to most people. The page included the full names of my mother, my father, both my brothers, and everything she could find about all of our work histories. She even included the date my mother died. While accuracy isn’t James’s strong suit — at one point my page stated I am half-Hindu — it felt like an intimidation tactic: Look how much I know about you.

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Recall that one of James’s goals of the Transphobia Project was “get[ting] a few people fired along the way”. The updated version of Transgender Map seems to be operating with very similar motives: the pages seem designed to trigger negative personal and professional repercussions.

“The first time my 11-year-old daughter googled me, this was the first thing that came up,” said Lisa Selin Davis, a friend of mine who has also written at length about gender identity and youth transition. “It includes the names of my children and two family members… It’s designed to silence and humiliate us. I can handle it, but it’s a little heartbreaking to me that my kid had to see this instead of anything else about me.”

Another one of James’s victims is Paul Garcia-Ryan. He is a therapist who trained at a leading gender-affirming clinic in New York City. He is concerned about the quality of care that gender dysphoric youth receive and is seeking to improve it. He recently spoke at the first conference held by the Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine (SEGM), a group with similar aims, in New York. (I was in attendance as well.) This alone was enough to rouse James’s ire, and soon Garcia-Ryan discovered his newly published page, which falsely describes him as an “anti-transgender activist” and explicitly instructs any minors who find themselves in his care to break off their therapy with him.

“Efforts to damage the reputations of clinicians creates a chilling effect amongst medical and mental health professionals, deterring them from speaking up, even when their concerns are grounded in legitimate scientific, medical, and ethical considerations,” Garcia-Ryan said in an email. “Clinicians hold an enormous responsibility and thoughtful work with gender dysphoria requires professionals to be courageous and stand firm in their clinical integrity.”

James has targeted a number of other responsible and careful clinicians in the field of youth gender medicine. She has also created a page for Gordon Guyatt, a legend within the field of medical research. He is one of the founders of evidence-based medicine, a (genuinely) lifesaving movement to improve the quality of medical research. Because Guyatt spoke at SEGM, he’s now a transphobe, according to the unerring moral judgment of Andrea James. He is tarred as an “anti-transgender activist” — ironic, given that when I asked him about the claim that questioning the evidence for transgender medicine is itself transphobic, he replied: “You’re doing harm to transgender people if you don’t question the evidence.”

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But James’s website is more about rage than reason. Really, all it takes to land oneself on it is to have said something publicly that she disagrees with, or to have associated, in any way, with any institution or any person she dislikes. For example, she has a page dedicated to a European academic — a far-Left trans man who couldn’t be more in favour of trans people’s dignity and right to medically transition — simply because he has published some (rather excellent) work criticising certain mainstream strains of trans activism, including on this website. This is someone who has dedicated years of his life to radical trans activism, and now his second-highest search result in Incognito mode on Google Chrome is a webpage that suggests he is enabling transphobia.

Garcia-Ryan’s page ranks highly if you search his name, too. That’s the whole point: to scare people off talking about this issue. I’m telling you a tiny fraction of the stories I’ve heard from individuals targeted by James, many of whom don’t want to come forward. In short, very little has changed since Alice Dreger published her first long expose of the Michael Bailey affair back in 2008: “Almost universally those who wrote to me [about their run-ins with James] — including sex researchers — asked that I not ever quote them or mention them by name,” she wrote. “They feared being attacked by James, as Bailey and others had been.”

For that reason, and because of my own involvement, I have been deeply conflicted about writing this piece. But it’s a perfect 2023 story, in a way. It epitomises an approach to social justice and to journalism that is so anti-intellectual, and unforgiving that it’s impossible to imagine it making the world a better place. But perhaps most disturbing is that there’s no accountability. No one can control whether they’re included on James’s site. There’s no one to appeal to other than James herself, and she has proved herself time and time again to be unreasonable. (I emailed James about this piece. She sent a brief response, which didn’t address any of my points, and has not commented further.)

But our information ecosystem doesn’t reward reasonableness — it rewards reaction and outrage. And particularly when the subject is social justice, media outlets are all too eager to abdicate their basic responsibilities as guardians of the truth.

Mishima examined strength and weakness in some of the greatest works of 20th-century literature. The Temple of the Golden Pavilion (1956), for instance, tells the story of a pathetic, dissolute son of a consumptive Buddhist priest, growing up amid the wartime wreckage of mid-century Japan. The protagonist, Mizoguchi, experiences various indignities while descending into mental illness, culminating with a suicide attempt he ultimately abandons, choosing life instead.

Mizoguchi is based on Mishima’s study of a real-life Buddhist acolyte, Hayashi Yōken, who burnt down the titular pavilion. Albert Borowitz described the arson in his 2005 book, Terrorism for Self-Glorification, emphasising that Japanese authorities attempted to conceal Yōken’s name, for fear of him achieving national celebrity. This anti-hero’s weakness — and resulting madness — arises within the context of a society perceived as both impotent and decadent; striking parallels exist between him and today’s hapless, bullied mass shooters, such as Elliot Rodger and, more recently, Anderson Lee Aldrich.

But Mishima is most often invoked by online admirers in 2022 not for his literary greatness or political insight, but his personal aesthetic. He was, for want of a better word, ripped — lean and well-defined from the practice of weight training, karate and kendo, which he undertook because he wished to experience “the essence of action and power”. The Mishima of the Western cultural imagination, then, is similar to the Oscar Wilde who allegedly told André Gide in Algiers that he put his genius into his life, and only his talent into his works.

It was a life that ended with a picture-perfect tableau: a ritual suicide, alongside a 24-year-old male follower, in the office of a commandment of Japan’s Self-Defense Forces, where he had attempted to initiate some sort of national — or at least nationalist — renewal by means of a carefully stage-managed coup. Latter-day dissident intellectuals such as Bronze Age Pervert, writing in Bronze Age Mindset, understand Mishima’s appeal: “A beautiful death in youth is a great thing, to leave behind a beautiful body, and the best study of this pursuit you find in the novels of Mishima, a real connoisseur.”

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Mishima’s perfect body was based on both a Western sculptural ideal, rooted in Greco-Roman ideals of beauty, and “silence”: the pull of a “wordless body, full of physical beauty, in opposition to beautiful words that imitated physical beauty”. Language, the stuff of social media posts, hot takes, and the political opportunists running our country, seems to exist to conceal and deceive; Mishima sought the “pure sense of strength” — some ideal that would tether him, body and soul, to “ultimate reality”.

He dreamed big, then. But materially, Mishima was limited. This much is obvious from the 1960 film Afraid to Die, in which he played the starring role as a gangster. He makes a display of leather-clad toughness, chest puffed out as far as his well-defined but concave pectorals can go. But it is almost a camp toughness, a little boy strutting and fretting along the stage in tough-man drag. Mishima, all of 5’4” on tiptoes, is no swaggering Marlon Brando or Burt Lancaster. From the perspective of a functional strength athlete, it is bizarre that he commands so much attention. And yet there he is, even if he is in “hyper-masculinity drag”, admired by all manners of weightlifting intellectuals and dispossessed dissidents.

It is this quality of Mishima that reveals something unexpected about the muscle boys of 2022. His modelling — artistic, sensitive, and even quite beautiful when working with photographers like Eikoh Hosoe — conveys in most cases not pure strength but a body that has “transitioned” to be more masculine. It is an end result that is at least stronger — if not as strong as it appears — frozen in time by the camera. The images for which Mishima sat, like the ritual death for which he spent years preparing, is somehow more important to his contemporary acolytes than the day-in, day-out life he actually led — which is exactly how Mishima would have wanted it.

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If this sounds bizarre, consider a quotation from the Washington Post’s recent series on the dangers of excessive steroid and diuretic use in bodybuilders. Mike Israetel, a 38-year-old bodybuilder who holds a PhD in sports science, described why he has used steroids for the past decade: “I’m almost to that size…[where] these are pictures that I’ll have forever, that I can look back on and say: ‘Wow, I really did the thing. I really looked the part, like the part that I was truly capable of looking.’” In other words, Israetel has built his body expressly for the pictures, so he can see himself looking the way he wished to be.

This was the same desire that provoked Samuel Fussell, a slender, dissipated academic, to take up the “steel” in the late Eighties. In his memoir Muscle, he describes how he pursued the creation of a new body, abetted by steroids, to serve as a hyper-masculine self that he portrayed to the world. Behind it, he could hide whatever remained of his real self. “Everything I’d done for the last four years had been an effort to keep the world at bay, to find a place in which I wouldn’t have to react or think or feel,” Fussell wrote of his transformation. His body grew far larger than Mishima’s or even Mike Israetel’s. But, he wrote, “as big as I’d gotten and impressive and imposing as I looked ‘standing relaxed,’ I felt that if you could somehow find a chink in my armour… you’d find nothing within that vast white empty space but a tiny soul about the size of an acorn.”

In my many years of interviewing bodybuilders, I’ve seen this philosophy crop up a lot. When I spoke to the long-time pro Bob Paris, who during the Eighties and early Nineties married considerable mass with Frank Zane-calibre aesthetics, he told me that putting on a “gorilla suit” — the title of his memoir — provided, among other things, some cover for the homosexuality he wouldn’t disclose to the world until the early Nineties. “I hated myself”, he wrote in his memoir. “My limbs were all in the wrong places, my teeth were weird, the hair on my head from outer space, the hair sprouting on my chest embarrassing. And I was a fag.” Or, as he summarised it to me: “What’s the old saying? ‘Show me a bodybuilder and I’ll show you a guy with dad issues.’”

Mishima, Israetel, Fussell, and Paris all wished to be seen, and see themselves, in a certain way. But the latter two renounced this pursuit in their memoirs. Both continued to train for health and general fitness, but they have lost their will to discipline their bodies in pursuit not of functional strength but some sort of particular image. As Fussell put it when he walked away from bodybuilding: “My lifting was life-denying rather than life-affirming… I was a lonely and solitary sceptic in this realm of smiling and pumped Pollyannas.” Paris was more emphatic: “At the end of my bodybuilding rainbow, instead of a pot of gold, there was a complication; beyond that, frustration.”

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These patterns of thought have appeared in many of the other interviews I’ve done, too. When I spoke to a 20-something gay software engineer named Zander, who was using heroic doses of steroids to become the “muscle bear” of his dreams, he put the matter succinctly, drawing on the language of gender identitarians: “I sometimes see the use of steroids by men as like, being assigned male at birth, but identifying as even more male than your natural physiology would allow.”

He then put the question to me directly: “In a world in which we were truly free to express our gender identity, would you be able to get prescribed supraphysiological doses of testosterone to fix the persistent feeling that you were not manly enough?” 

Zander, like Mishima and Fussell, grew up weak and badly out of shape; his “transition”, which mirrors the one described by Mishima in his essay Sun and Steel, albeit with steroidal intervention, was an identity overhaul for him. It was, moreover, not something I understood, despite my years of lifting: I was a big kid, with a big father who had been a big-time athlete, and bigness and its attendant qualities, such as strength, was something I took as a given, until beginning to write about it decades later. I never had the experience, as California mass shooter Elliot Rodger wrote in his 2014 manifesto, of losing a trivial martial arts contest to a boy “who was so much physically stronger than me” that even “the deep anger inside me” couldn’t close the gap. It was, in other words, utterly alien to my own experience of masculinity, which I rarely considered; it was what it was, for good or ill.

Zander’s earnest discussion of this process, less artistic by far than Mishima’s analysis but equally heartfelt, calls to mind psychologist J. Michael Bailey’s treatment of “autogynephilic transsexuals” in his 2003 book, The Man Who Would Be Queen: “Autogynephilic transsexuals might declare attraction to men or women, to both, or to neither, but their primary attraction is to the women that they would become.” Could Zander and Mishima and all the others so obsessed with his idea of presenting the image of masculinity, indeed of hyper-masculinity, be “auto-androphiles” of some sort: individuals primarily attracted to the men they would become? 

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After 20 years of work in the strength and fitness world, I believe there is an important parallel to be drawn here. One often (but not always) finds that individuals making this sort of transition to hyper-masculinity are bitterly opposed to those going in the opposite direction — viciously critical of transgender females, in other words. Yet in their attraction to the men they want to become, there is a great deal of similarity: both are in love with the “hyper” aspect of their own mirror (or selfie)-reflected performances, whether it be hyper-masculinity or hyper-femininity.

Bodybuilders, from the anonymous model for the Farnese Hercules in the early third century AD, to ever-accelerating, the strongman Eugen Sandow in the early 20th century, have always shown off the fruits of their labour. But the technology of 2022 lets us go far beyond that, to admittedly unhealthy extremes. The narcissism of the present age is evident in an obsession with not just images but total control of the image. (Of course Mishima has become an icon: he stage-managed his own death.) Now cameras, filters and even AI art can take us even further; we are awash in self-love, on as many screens as possible.

Of course, wanting to be stronger is a reasonable goal: as strength coach Mark Rippetoe told me when I spoke to him, strength is preferable to weakness, even if “six-pack abdominals” matter little with regard to functional capacity. But when it crosses the line into disordered gender performance, it loses any such claim to utility. Even the old guard of ostensibly aesthetics-oriented bodybuilders recognise this. When I interviewed Frank Zane, perhaps the most aesthetically-minded bodybuilder of all time, he told me he had little use for selfies or heavily edited photography because they prevented the objective feedback that a picture simulating real-life conditions could provide. A man’s body, he told me, is a well-oiled machine — not a fantastically distorted ideal that one presents as standing in for something greater, but a functional construct that had to be seen up close and assessed in real life.

That level of what-you-see-is-what-you-get objective reality, not Mishima’s “ultimate reality” or the “hyper-masculinity” of the auto-androphile, served for Zane as the natural limit on aesthetic flights of fancy. It is a boundary, I think, that young men looking to build strong, healthy bodies would be well served to keep in mind.

***

Order your copy of UnHerd’s first print edition here. 

Kathleen Stock recently suggested in UnHerd that autogynephilia (AGP) was a motive for “some but not all within the male trans demographic” to immerse themselves in the fiction of changing sex. Ray Blanchard, the sexologist who coined the terminology, went further. Last year, he told me that “in the Western Hemisphere and English-speaking Commonwealth countries, the overwhelming majority of adult natal males presenting with gender dysphoria are of the autogynephilic type”.

AGP drove my own transsexualism. But in a debate where the condition is simultaneously denied and monstered, it is unsurprisingly also misunderstood. Stock described it as a fetish and suggested that it was likely to be influenced by pornography. While it might exhibit itself in fetishistic behaviour and be fed by porn, my experience of AGP extends back to my earliest memories. If I was not born with this pervading condition, it had gripped me by age three.

More than 50 years later, I can still picture the scene. I was learning to count beyond 20, and quickly picked up the pattern — 30, 40, 50 — and the repetition. But by the time we got to 60, a chill ran down my spine. We would soon be at 80 — a word sounded similar to “tights”, clothing that I knew was only for girls.

Why this was such a taboo for me, and at such an early age, I don’t know. Clearly I understood the difference between boys and girls; I knew I was a boy, and I knew that we wore different clothes. But I wanted to wear girls’ clothes, something I knew was forbidden. I cannot remember being told such things, but nobody had told me how to breathe either, or know how to feel hungry or thirsty, or go to sleep when I was tired. But every other sexually dimorphic species needs to know the difference between the sexes without being schooled on it. Why should human beings be different?

Clothes were the issue for me throughout childhood. But I had no sisters and I had to make do with my own fantasy world. During primary school, however, I stumbled upon two opportunities to turn that fantasy into reality. I remember them like oases in a desert.

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First, there was a village fete where my ladybird costume involved wearing a tight black jumper and black tights. The red papier-mâché on my back was incidental. Adrenaline overwhelmed me, but I was too ashamed to tell anyone. I was probably aged six. Three years later, a school Christmas play offered another cross-dressing opportunity. Nothing special – I was a carol singer – but for some long forgotten reason, the boys were dressed the same as the girls. But by then I was imprisoned by my own fear and never took the message home. My costume was never made and I played my role in mufti.

In those days, an interest in clothes of the opposite sex was labelled as transvesitism, something distinct from transsexualism, a compulsion to be the opposite sex. But in reality, the two conditions are not so easy to separate. Transvestites may have been ridiculed, while transsexuals were pitied, but there is truth behind an old joke in the trans community: What’s the difference between a transvestite and a transsexual? About five years.

These days it seems that we are all transwomen, which may remove the need for any demarcation, but also removes the need to think about AGP. However, while language may change, human nature remains the same from generation to generation. In a 2005 study of 2,450 Swedish adults, Långström and Zucker found that almost 3% of men “reported at least one episode of transvestic fetishism”. I wonder how many more did not report their furtive activities? Whatever the truth, this behaviour appears to be rather more common than the 0.3% to 0.7% “tentatively” estimated by the UK government in 2018.

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My experience alone suggests that boys wrestle with AGP long before puberty. But it was during adolescence when my long-running fantasy — usually of waking up to find myself magically transformed into the other sex — became a compulsion to start buying female clothes. By the time I was 16, I would travel to neighbouring towns, buy what I could and squirrel my purchases away in intricate, secure hiding places. Being discovered was the most shameful thing I could imagine. At no point did pornography play a part — this was the Eighties and I had no access to it. The compulsion came from within: my thoughts were driven by my own nature.

Life is very different for children growing up today, and not always in a good way. Transitioning was never an option for me as a child so it was futile to go beyond dreaming about it. Instead, my energies were directed into my studies and my relationships — and keeping my AGP well hidden. The mental stress was incessant.

But I endured. I eventually married a woman, and we had three children. Those four people mean the world to me. Autogynephilia drifted in and out of remission but it never took over. At least not until the internet connected me to other people who had transitioned and had made it work. These were not the exotic transsexuals that I had read about in the Sunday People — high-life celebs who had sex-changes in Casablanca. They were people just like me — engineers, medics, teachers even — who had gone to their GPs to ask for a referral to an NHS gender clinic. When I knew that medical and surgical transition was possible, it rapidly became irresistible.

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But what opened up to me in mid-life, now beckons to children. I worry about both sexes. In her superb book Irreversible Damage, Abigail Shrier explores on the transgender contagion among teenage girls. But what about boys particularly those struggling with AGP? These days they might be adorned with new labels — trans girls — but the condition is the same. Who is looking out for them? Who is counselling those who come forwards, and how are they being counselled? I cannot do it — I am no therapist — and I firmly believe all AGP adults, indeed all transsexuals, should stay clear. We come with our own baggage and children need to be able to focus on their own issues when they see a counsellor.

When I was young, I coped because I had to cope. What alternative was there? But it would have helped me to know what was really going on. The tragedy is that the current generation of AGP boys are none the wiser. Either they are cooped up behind the same walls of shame and guilt that constrained me 40 years ago. Or they have been affirmed as “transgirls”. Or they are simply at a loss to understand themselves, feeling like an introvert among a party of extroverts.

These boys need help to understand themselves. Let’s not amplify their daydreams — fantasy does not become reality. But let’s not embarrass or monster them either. We need to be honest: autogynephilia is a psychological condition that we just have to live with. Some may end up transitioning in the end — we cannot put that particular internet genie back in the box — but that is a decision for adults to take, not children. If first do no harm, then second, let them at least grow up.

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, you’re doing it.

When immersed in a fiction, your direct aim isn’t to recognise and respond to the world as it actually is. To borrow a phrase from philosophy, your thoughts and behaviour aren’t directly “truth-tracking”. That’s usually ok, because fictions are supposed to be harmless bits of fun, or interesting encounters with possible-but-not-actual scenarios. But what they are not supposed to be are accurate reports of reality as you personally find it now. When immersed, it’s 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 you’re highly uncomfortable about the sexed aspects of your body — say, because they fail to fit prevalent bodily norms, or you think they do — you might experience relief to act as if you are of the opposite sex, or of no-sex.

It’s 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 “AGP”).

In plain language: AGP is a sexual turn-on for some males to enter into the fiction of being a woman. There’s 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 — idealistic young people, say, or university lecturers — to believe it. But numerous sources attest to it, and it’s important we recognise it clearly when it comes to discussing incursions into women’s rights.

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See, for instance, this Vice article 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 “forced” into “feminisation” by a dominatrix. Residual doubters should also read Deirdre McCloskey’s transition memoir Crossing, where the sexual element is cheerfully admitted. Or just look closely at this picture of a transwoman addressing the New York State Democratic Party.

When it comes to people who aren’t trans, the typical motivations for immersion in trans activism’s foundational fictions seem of four main sorts. First, there’s a desire to be kind to trans people, without a lot of further thought about what that might look like. Second, there’s those who want to seem kind because of the social capital it brings these days. Third, there’s a desire to avoid ostracisation, since you know you will be socially punished if you don’t. And fourth, there’s 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 isn’t 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 can’t 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 story 

What does a fiction need in order to seem vivid and realistic — 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 doesn’t 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-published article by philosopher Dan Williams describes a related phenomenon. In today’s world, he argues, “pundits and opinion-producers” provide apparently supportive arguments and other justifications for conclusions that people were already motivated to believe anyway — and they do so “in exchange for money and social rewards”. A marketplace for the rationalisations of desired beliefs has developed, he suggests.

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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 “transwomen are women”, “transmen are men”, and “nonbinary people are neither women nor men”. Since the system currently rewards them for doing this, I think their unconscious motive is often career advancement and social recognition from peers, though it’s inevitably dressed up as something moral.

In the area I’m 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 2016 article on the nature of womanhood, published in prestigious philosophy journal Ethics, by declaring: “The proposition that trans gender identities are entirely valid — that trans women are women and trans men are men — is a foundational premise of my argument, which I will not discuss further.” (It’s telling that “valid” is used here in the Tumblr sense 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 Jenkins’s paper, not enormously surprisingly under the circumstances, is that we should use the term “woman” 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 doesn’t want to be classified as a woman should not be. Barnes then advances a hilariously tortured rationalisation for claims like “transwomen are women”, arguing that there aren’t any “deep, language-independent facts about which people are women, which people are genderqueer, etc”.

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 aren’t any tables, strictly speaking, though perhaps there are “simples arranged table-wise”. Nonetheless we can still utter the true sentence “there are tables”. Similarly, though for somewhat different reasons, the metaphysical facts about womanhood and other “gendered” groups come apart from the truth conditions of sentences involving … oh I give up, I don’t have to pretend to take this stuff seriously anymore. (I confess, though, that I remain disappointed Barnes didn’t try to argue that women are “simples arranged woman-wise”.)

In the social sciences, meanwhile, things don’t 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: “there is an extremely low prevalence of regret in transgender patients after surgery” (i.e. medically-assisted immersion is harmless); “administering cross-sex hormones to gender dysphoric adolescence lowers suicidal ideation” (i.e. medically-assisted immersion is beneficial); “questioning the ‘ontological reality’ of transgender identities leads to transphobic harassment” (i.e. as a non-trans person, refusing to immerse yourself in the fictions of trans people causes trans people to be harassed); “non-suicidal self-injury is common in trans youth and emphasises the need for interventions that reduce transphobia” (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.

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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 isn’t 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, this piece, this one, this one, this one, and this one 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 convincing appearance 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 kid’s make-believe game might go: if this doll is a “explorer”, and this chair is an “elephant”, then, if I put the doll on top of the chair, “an explorer is riding an elephant”.

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 “women”. Partly this is a matter of working out what would follow logically, given the way the concepts “woman” and “man” usually work. For instance, if transwomen are “women”, then transwomen are a sub-set of women generally, so we also need a special word for the sub-set of women that aren’t trans: “cis women”. If transwomen are “women”, then, since women before the age of sexual maturity are “girls”, transwomen before the age of sexual maturity are “girls” too. Since women who have children are “mothers”, transwomen with children are also “mothers”. Since women exclusively sexually attracted to other women are “lesbians”, transwomen exclusively sexually attracted to other women are “lesbians” as well (and so on and so on).

And then there’s the practice of extending the entitlements and resources of women to transwomen, because transwomen are “women”, so they are imagined to share precisely those entitlements and need exactly those resources too. As we now know to women’s cost, being immersed in the fiction that transwomen are “women” has led to the dismantling of single-sex services and resources built painstakingly over years, largely in the pursuit of aesthetic verisimilitude for males.

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Meanwhile, if transwomen are “women”, 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 “misogyny”, 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 have 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 the “the highest paid female executive in America” according to New York magazine. 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 broken “women’s records” for swimming. Novelist Torrey Peters is a transwoman, and transwomen are women: this means Peters’ novel Detransition Baby is eligible for longlisting in the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2022.

In this story-world, women’s achievements are gradually reduced, to be replaced with altogether grimmer kinds of headline involving “women” engaged in characteristically male crimes such as paedophilia, violent assault, and indecent exposure. Last week, the Scottish Daily Record reported that Shay Sims, “a female” in court who had “pleaded guilty to three charges of assault by beating, criminal damage and outraging public decency”, had “raised her dress up and lowered her pants to reveal a penis and continued to walk 40 feet with the penis exposed”. And last Wednesday, the New York Times reported that an “83-year-old woman”, 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 “men”? In the contrasting case of the fiction that transmen are “men”, given the centrality of the concept “man” 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 ongoing campaign in the UK to have a transman registered as a legal “father” on a birth certificate. But curiously, in most other areas men’s spaces, resources, entitlements, and achievements are being left untouched.

3) Retconning the past

Some story-makers engage in “retconning” — making new stories continuous with old ones by changing elements of the old one retrospectively. Famously — at least, for people my age and older — in the soap opera Dallas, 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; Ewan Forbes; James Barry; Joan of Arc; Queen Hatshepsut; Kurt Cobain. We also get the creative reinterpretation of other cultural traditions, with the Hijra, Fa’afafine, Fakaleitī, and Kathoey people all anomalously represented under the essentially Western, relatively modern concept of “trans”.

And then, of course, we also get the fiction of the “trans” child — the most audacious retcon of them all. Transwomen who are “women” must once have been “girls”, and transmen who are “men” must once have been “boys” — which, by extrapolation, means that there must be “girls” in the population of male children, and “boys” in the population of female children, right now. “Trans” children (so often female, but never mind about that) “know who they are”, and should have the “freedom to be themselves”, we are told. Yet this “freedom” may well involve a child’s 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 she’s 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 – indeed, to start believing in it, full stop — instead of treating it as one make-believe game among many, as part of a healthy development. Children’s bodies are being used as props in adult dramas they have no way of properly understanding until it’s too late for them.

4) Remembering to turn off your phone

When you go to the cinema, you’re 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. There’s the annoying fact that biological sex in humans is immutable. Remembering this can be a real buzzkill when you’re 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 can’t be transcended.

In a recent case, several student editors of the academic journal Law and Contemporary Problems publicly resigned when they found out their journal would be publishing an article of mine entitled: “The Importance of Referring to Human Sex in Language”. (Please do read it to annoy them.) There are several precedents for this, of course — most obviously, the anomalously severe treatment of Lisa Littman’s paper on rapid onset gender dysphoria 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. Rowling’s 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 “He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named” 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.

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And then there’s the 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 don’t 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 there’s no inevitability about transitioning on the basis of feelings of dysphoria. The idea that someone is “born trans” or has no choice but to transition, given “who they really are inside”, is a myth. Detransitioners establish this. Now, not all trans people are committed to ignoring this fact — 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 — a mistake that may later cause grave and irrevocable problems for their child’s 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, the Creator-character in The Truman Show — 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 Stock’s Substack.