The War to Annihilate Sex

The left is living in its own private Vietnam: an unwinnable quagmire which no one wanted and which has no good outcome.

This is an article designed to lay out the state of the “gender debate” to those looking for a broad overview and an introductory grounding in the subject.

It’s divided into six short parts. The first part is an introduction to the sides in the conflict. The second part explores one side’s viewpoint in depth — this is the side that I take. The third part explores the opposing side’s view. The fourth part explores the rationales and the stakes which motivate each side. The fifth part looks at the impact of this war on children and adolescents, and their families. The final part looks to the future and the direction that the war is headed.

YOU CAN LISTEN INSTEAD. Hear me read this article:

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PART ONE

What the hell is going on?

If there's one single thing I want you to understand about the “gender debate,” it's this:

This is an urgent medical and scientific issue. It's not left wing versus right wing. It's not love versus hate.

I work with transgender people. I socialize with transgender people. I advocate for the rights of transgender people.

I've been around transsexuals and transgender people since the 1990s: I worked at a trans bar in 1998 & 1999, and before that I was a scrawny, homeless gay kid hanging around the gay village, where my teenage friend was murdered while hustling as a transgender prostitute. And well before that, as a toddler I developed gender dysphoria and I grew up wishing I was a girl. I've thought long and hard about issues of gender, sex, and sexuality ever since I was a little boy. And what I'm seeing today scares me.

When I was working as a bartender in the gay village recently, I saw a community ravaged by a tidal wave of extreme and nonsensical rhetoric around gender.

Science vs. Superstition

There is a huge conflict going on right now, but it's not “anti-trans” versus “pro-trans.”

It's science versus superstition. It's sound medical treatment versus charlatans selling snake oil. Biological reality versus tribalistic make-believe.

It's a group of rational, open-minded, pragmatic transsexuals, gays, therapists, sexologists, and biologists, backed by a knowledge base built up over more than a century, versus a brand-new, social-media-fuelled, furious activist movement that is at war against anything to do with the facts of biology and sex.

The culture war and a new age of paranoia

And this latter faction have become supercharged by aligning themselves with toxic culture-war politics. They have framed those of us who dare to raise even the mildest concerns as evil, right-wing bigots. They've created a climate of paranoia among progressive-minded people, which has quickly devolved into a witch hunt, turning workplaces into political minefields, and ripping families and social circles apart, in a way that arguably hasn't been seen since McCarthyism and the Red Scare of the 1940s and ‘50s.

The “transphobia” panic on the left in today’s post-gay-marriage era has the same shape of the “communism” panic on the right during the post-World War II era: a kind of post-traumatic rebound effect in the aftermath of a hard-won victory, in which people are training the vestiges of their combative energy back against their own side. We’ve all but won the gay rights war, but we’re still stuck in a beleaguered, belligerent mindset, and with few real enemies left to fight, we’re turning on each other.

This has led to a purity spiral: a moral-righteousness bidding contest. No one is safe from the charge of “transphobia,” and people are manoeuvring to distance themselves from potential targets in order to avoid becoming targets themselves.

In this climate, even scientists who’ve spent their whole lives compassionately studying transgenderism in order to support trans people have been labelled “transphobic” and faced vicious campaigns to ruin their careers. Transsexuals themselves aren’t even safe: the ones who ask too many questions about who exactly qualifies as “trans” these days amid the ever-changing rules are called “scum” — they even have their own entry in Wikipedia’s dictionary — and they’re banished from transgender communities.

After the emergence of social media, people started making up their own rules and definitions about sex and gender. By 2010 they were publishing them on Wikipedia as if they were established facts. To them, people who take a moderate, scientific view of transgender are called “truscum”: From tru- (“true, genuine”) + scum.

Tolerance & scientific literacy: meet the sex realists

On my side of this dispute are science-minded, compassionate, decent and sympathetic transsexuals, who understand first and foremost that human sex doesn't literally change, and who are unafraid to admit that they have a condition, rooted in the brain, whose neurological roots are fairly well-understood, although the science is not yet complete.

I'm incredibly proud to say that I've become friends with some of the world's leading scientists in the fields of sex, sexuality, and gender. Some of them have praised me for acquiring deep scientific knowledge of these topics. And I'm equally proud that many of my transsexual friends have praised me for my effort to understand their condition.

I’m about as far from an ignorant bigot as one can get.

I work with transsexuals to fight for proper medical care for youth who are experiencing distress about gender and sex, because I experienced distress about gender and sex in my own youth, and because all my life I’ve seen the struggles that gender nonconforming and transsexual people go through. My colleague was just featured on the front page of the New York Times, which corroborated her whistleblowing about dangerous and unscientific practices within the youth gender clinics that have recently sprouted up across the continent.

Jamie Reed, married to a transsexual and “politically left of Bernie Sanders” in her own words, is a whistleblower calling out the medical malpractice she witnessed while working in the nascent field of youth transgender medicine.

Social media and queer theory: the birth of a strange, sex-denialist movement

On the other side of the dispute are a group that came to prominence in the age of social media, via websites like Reddit, Tumblr, 4Chan, and DeviantArt, who strongly resemble a New Religious Movement in their fundamentalism and fervour. They have developed their own parallel “science” and their own set of “gender experts” to back their views, drawn largely from an artsy, avant-garde, pretentious subgenre of academic literary criticism in the humanities called “queer theory,” which is not remotely scientific in nature.

Judith Butler is the L. Ron Hubbard of “queer theory” — a babbling purveyor of gender-Scientological nonsense who is worshipped by the movement’s followers.

This group upholds an incoherent, fuzzy belief system that is hostile to the facts of biology with regard to human sex: they claim that there is no meaningful distinction between human males and human females at all. (This is especially incoherent considering that transsexualism literally wouldn't make sense if there weren't any sex distinctions to transition between.)

The fundamentalists at the core of this group advocate that the binary of biological sex — the fact that humans, like all mammals, come in two sexes, male and female — is an oppressive “white supremacist colonialist” fiction, and that all aspects of biological sex distinction in society, from medical anatomy textbooks to female sports leagues to rape crisis centres, and especially biological sex preferences in the bedroom (that is, exclusive homosexuality and heterosexuality), must be abolished.

Fundamentalist activists are turning their ire towards the facts of biology. Ideology has clashed with biology before: in the US, Christian creationists once prosecuted schoolteachers for teaching evolution, and in the Communist East, genetics was deemed to contradict Marxist principles, leading to a purge of biologists which caused an agricultural catastrophe that killed tens of millions by starvation in China and Russia.

And they really, literally mean it: this isn't about people's freedom to wear gender-bending clothes, change their appearance and their names. Most people stopped worrying about that decades ago. (See: the entire 1980s in music.) Nor does it have to do with equal rights between men and women: feminists argue that you can’t have equal rights between the sexes if you turn a blind eye to males’ and females’ biological differences. (The new activists are explosively hostile to the women who say this.) And it’s got nothing to do with the few people born with rare sex-chromosome disorders or genital abnormalities, either.

Gender Fundamentalism is about making an impossible wish come true: they want the fact that humans come in two sexes — male and female — to disappear. They want to completely wipe this simple biological fact — the very bedrock of human anatomy, human reproduction, human sexuality — from existence, for everyone.

Take a minute to think about how crazy that actually is.

The American Anthropological Association and the Canadian Anthropology Society have taken the incredible step of banning discussions of biological sex “to protect the transgender community,” going so far as to state that “the science is settled” that humans are not subject to the facts of biology.

People with good intentions are being hoodwinked & bullied

Orbiting at the softer, outer layers of their belief system are well-meaning progressives (like you, I assume) who have been misled into aligning with the fundamentalists, believing that the only way to affirm your loyalty, allegiance, and protectiveness towards gays, lesbians, gender nonconforming people, and transsexuals is to actively support — or at the very least never question — this bizarre, giant new social engineering endeavour to subjugate and dismantle the concept of biological sex.

Which is odd, to say the least, because our biological sex is the very thing that makes gay people like me homo-sex-ual, and which makes my trans friends trans-sex-ual. It’s something which our rights — the ones you claim to care so much about — cannot exist without, because if you really think about it, we can’t even be accurately identified and described without reference to our sex.

Sex-ism, discrimination against women based on their sex, also cannot be identified and described without reference to women’s sex. So it’s no wonder feminists are alarmed, too.

My friend Fred Sargeant, legendary gay rights pioneer and founder of Gay Pride (he organized the first march on the anniversary of the Stonewall riots in New York) was violently assaulted and hospitalized last year by activists at a Pride parade in Vermont, because he demonstrated with slogans that oppose queer theory and Gender Fundamentalism.

So that's what the root of this war looks like: on one side there are transsexuals, homosexuals, feminists, and our allies who know that biological sex is real, it matters to our health and to our rights, and it doesn't literally change. And on the other side, there are fundamentalist “gender” activists and their unwitting accomplices, who believe biological sex itself is the enemy, and that anyone who acknowledges the reality of sex is a witch to be burned.

Lately, the extremists have successfully dominated the narrative around transgender in the North American media landscape, but as you’ll see later on, that’s beginning to change.

Rabid censorship and #NoDebate

The zealots at the core of what is often called Gender Identity Ideology (I prefer simply to call it Gender Fundamentalism) are bullying well-meaning liberals to stay away from me and my colleagues and friends, the rational, science-informed transsexuals and homosexuals, and the therapists, clinicians, historians, feminists, philosophers, atheists, humanists, psychologists, neuroscientists, and sexologists aligned with us.

This is because we can help people who experience distress and confusion around gender and sex to understand themselves in a healthy, science-based, non-superstitious way. Because of this, we are Enemy Number One.

To the fundamentalists, one’s “gender identity” is magic, and anyone spoiling the illusion with science is “denying their existence.” They want the truth to be censored, and they're doing an incredible job accomplishing just that — at least for now. Their mantra is “no debate,” their mindset is fanatically absolutist, and their tactics are sometimes physically violent. They aim to stop fact-based discussions about transgender and transsexualism being had, anywhere, no matter how compassionate and sympathetic the discussions are.

A New Religious Movement, indeed.

Gender fundamentalists increasingly resort to violence to silence academics, feminists, and gay & transsexual rights activists.

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PART TWO

So what is the science-based view of sex, gender, and transgender?

Allow me to present to you the truth that the fundamentalists are so afraid of, free from queer theory pseudoscience, and free from polarized identity politics. This is pure science, reason, and sympathy. There isn't a drop of hatred anywhere in it.

But if you're under the illusion that “gender identity” is merely an uplifting, mystical journey of spiritual self-discovery, buckle up. It's not all rainbows, glitter, “trans joy” and parades. Gender journeys often involve scalpels, scars, side effects, and sometimes regret. And hidden among the ranks of the “gender identity” revolution there are quacks, shamans, kinksters, hucksters, and all the usual stock characters who flood in to extract money and power anytime a new field crops up where critical thinking has been forbidden.

Transgender vs. transsexual

To me and my friends, transgender is an umbrella term, the boundary of which is not widely agreed upon. Transvestites, drag queens, “nonbinary” teens… opinions vary about who counts as transgender. Broadly interpreted, it just means anyone who is very gender nonconforming.

The term transgender is not very useful because it has no agreed-upon definition. No wonder everyone’s terrified to discuss this subject: activists have made the language next to impossible to navigate.

Transsexualism is a term for people who have undergone medical procedures to modify their bodies’ visible sex characteristics to treat a specific condition, which originates in the brain, and which can be measured, studied, and understood scientifically, rationally, and compassionately.

Gender expression matters, but sex is still real

Gender expression, such as clothing and hairstyle, has significant meaning to trans people, just as gender expression has significant meaning to everyone.

But it’s important to understand that this meaning operates on a social level, and does not override anyone's biological sex in deeper, more substantive contexts that involve the physical body, such as genetics, medicine, athletics... and most importantly, sexuality.

Sex vs. gender expression: physical bodies vs. social signals

The human social and sexual landscape is suffused with signals we constantly send and receive, consciously and unconsciously, through our behaviour and appearance, to indicate to other humans whether we are male or female, among other things. We have evolved deep instincts that influence how we send these signals, and these instincts play a large part in our choice of dress, hairstyle, makeup… this is what drives our gender expression. Most people’s instincts are to send sex signals that align with their biological sex. But, as is always the case with anything to do with social and sexual behaviour in our most unusual species, there is much diversity.

What we call “gender expression” in humans is analagous to the displays of sexual dimorphism — visible distinctions between male and female — other species have evolved to express through plumage or hair (or other means). These distinctions are related to social behaviour and mating instincts. Human social behaviour and sexual orientation, however, is diverse and complex. Our species includes a significant minority who are born with atypical sexual orientations. So too is the diversity of gender expression among a significant minority of humans.

For a few reasons, which I’ll get to in a moment, some people develop a strong urge to send the social or sexual signals that are typical of the opposite sex. Voilà: transgender. But this doesn’t mean that they are the opposite sex.

Some people feel this urge strongly enough that they take drugs and have surgeries to modify the visible sex characteristics of their physical bodies. Voilà: transsexual. But this doesn’t mean they become the opposite sex.

(There’s also another group, who seem to be influenced by an urge to avoid the social or sexual signals of either sex, and they occasionally take drugs and have surgeries with the primary aim of escaping the sex-signalling aspects of their own sex. Voilà: nonbinary.)

The distinction between our social and sexual signals, which we can control, and our underlying biological sex, which we cannot control, never entirely disappears, and it matters in many contexts, including and especially the context of sexuality. This is where the conflict starts to flare up.

Tension and compromise: how we want to be perceived vs. how others perceive us

On the one hand, the gender expression we adopt plays a big role in how we want to be perceived.

But on the other hand, how others perceive us has a lot to do with our actual biological sex — regardless of the signals we’re sending. This is especially the case when it comes to dating and mating.

That's because humans’ sex detection skills are fine-tuned and highly accurate.

A billion years of evolution has given us a superpowered sense of the distinction between males and females. When it comes to our sexualities, for most of us, straight or gay, no amount of pronouns, surgeries, clothing and hairstyles can make us see past someone’s actual biological sex when we’re deciding whether or not to date or have sex with them. And that’s okay.

Homosexual males in Southeast Asia (kathoey, or “ladyboys”) and the Pacific Islands (fa’afafine) are socialized from a young age to embrace feminine gender expression — female-typical sex-signalling through clothing, hair, and jewelry — but it’s clearly understood that they’re not literally women. They are aware that they are male, and so are their friends, relatives, colleagues, and their romantic and sexual partners.

Take me, for example. I’m a gay man. I like and respect many transmen, and I even find some transmen quite handsome. But I don’t see them as potential sex partners, because my sexual orientation is firmly and exclusively directed at males. I am hard-wired to be sexually averse to females — all females, even ones who present themselves socially as transgender, even ones who’ve medically altered their appearance to more closely resemble males.

And that’s okay!

So there's an inevitable friction there. Rational transgender and transsexual people acknowledge that they must live with a tension between their preferred gender expression (driven by their social/sexual signalling instincts) and their true biological sex.

Trans people still find plenty of partners of course. But those of us on the rational side of the debate aren’t afraid to admit that trans people’s partners are well aware of their true biological sex. In fact, many people choose to date trans-identifying people because of the cross between their outward gender appearance and their biological sex, not in spite of it.

Both gender expression and biological sex play a role in transsexuals’ and transgender people’s lives, including their dating lives.

So that’s what trans is: a strong preference to adorn one’s body with the appearance of the opposite sex, which is not the same thing as being or becoming the opposite sex. And the distinction is important because our biological sex matters in a number of contexts.

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PART THREE

A grave social injustice: the new Gender Fundamentalist worldview

But over on the Gender Fundamentalist side of the debate, the specific point that we cannot literally transcend biological sex, especially in the social landscape of dating and mating, rouses tremendous distress and angry protest.

Gender Fundamentalists encourage people to interpret their preference to present in ways more typical of the opposite sex as proof that they somehow are the opposite sex: either spiritually, metaphysically, or literally.

They go on to interpret anyone and anything that contradicts that view as a threat. This can lead to severe and debilitating gender dysphoria — psychological distress at the sight or thought of their bodies’ sex characteristics. But it can also lead to antisocial behaviour: a misplaced, white-hot rage against anyone who doesn’t validate their beliefs.

Gender Fundamentalists don’t merely want civil rights and tolerance for transgender and transsexual people. They believe that biological sex itself is a social injustice that must be overcome.

Hmm. Wait a minute. A whole bunch of people forming a social movement around a passionately held metaphysical belief about their inner spiritual selves which contradicts material reality?

There’s a name for this: religion.

Gender Identity: a new metaphysical concept to replace sex in the age of social media

Gender Fundamentalism was born on the Internet. And it exploded when smartphones and social media got into young people’s hands. Our new digital social landscape is flooded with extreme sex signals: an endless parade of impossibly perfect bodies, and of course, a bottomless den of porn.

Young people navigating this new social milieu became understandably confused and anxious about sex, sexuality, and gender expression. But most of all, this hypersexual landcape made them feel powerless, isolated, and afraid, until they started connecting with each other on social media.

Collectively, on websites like Tumblr, they assembled their own baroque, Scientology-esque theory of “gender identity” (a term they took from a branch of psychology, but whose definition they changed).

Gender identity theory is a new metaphysical concept, based around freedom of choice and self-empowerment in the social-sexual landscape, and it’s designed to replace the scientific concept of biological sex, which of course is fixed in each of us from the moment we are conceived.

It is a product of young people’s confusion between the facts of biological sex (healthy, harmless, fun, beautiful, meaningful) and the warped way that sexuality is depicted on our screens (toxic, misogynist, impossible, unattainable, hypercompetitive, scary).

At first, the hypersexual internet landscape caused an epidemic of eating disorders among girls (and some boys). But as moderators banned content promoting anorexia, young people quickly channeled their anxieties into transgender and “nonbinary” identities instead. This protected them from moderators and other interventions: they could hide behind “LGBT” rights, and channel their angst into identity politics.

The movement’s core tenets are the following:

• Everyone’s “gender identity” is whatever they say it is.

• It completely replaces sex in every single context possible.

• Anyone who says otherwise is the enemy.

The stuff that follows from there is incoherent and self-contradictory.

(For example: if no one can ever tell what anyone’s gender identity is by looks alone, why do trans people put so much stock in their gendered appearance? How does gay and straight even work if you’re not allowed to distinguish between men and women anymore? If sex is really a spectrum, why aren’t the majority of trans people claiming to be something in between male and female, or some hybrid combination? Why haven’t any medical tests been developed to determine where exactly people are on this supposed spectrum? Why hasn’t anyone won a Nobel prize for discovering that humans don’t have biological sexes? Surely this is the biggest scientific discovery in history. Etc.)

But no matter. What’s important in this new worldview is that the internal tension people experience between their immutable sex and their feelings about gender expression can be recast as external oppression: a great social injustice. The latest civil rights frontier. Gay Rights 2.0.

Nevermind that trans people’s civil rights are already secure in the West: laws prohibiting crossdressing were taken off the books decades ago, medical treatment for severe gender dysphoria has been mainstream for half a century, trans people can marry and start families, and they have robust workplace and housing protections in most jurisdictions.

Trans activism is no longer about ensuring that trans people can live their lives in peace and liberty, it’s about forcing everyone else to unsee their biological sex, all the time, everywhere, by law. In that sense, the extremists quite literally want to take other people’s civil rights away.

A conspiracy of ignorance

And quite franky it’s making almost everyone anxious and paranoid about the whole topic. Ironically, the Gender Fundamentalist movement is achieving its objectives spectacularly, by confusing everyone into compliance.

I read a line that stuck with me, from a professional skeptic and UFO conspiracy theory debunker (who, incidentally, coined the term Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and had a bit part in the movie). He said, “There are two kinds of cover-ups: you can cover up knowledge or you can cover up ignorance.”

By now virtually every establishment institution, from Silicon Valley to Hollywood to Washington to Wall Street, is falling over itself to accommodate the new “gender identity” orthodoxy. If everyone’s sudden professed belief in Gender Identity Ideology (pronouns real, sex not real) can be seen as a kind of conspiracy — and I think it can — it can be said to have taken hold “not because they were hiding something but because they had no actual knowledge to hide.” Everybody’s stonewalling because nobody has a clue what’s going on.

A mental health crisis

By far the biggest problem faced by transgender and transsexual people today is not oppression or discrimination, it’s internal, mental anguish, and medical neglect and mistreatment. There is a massive and growing mental health crisis surrounding young people’s distress about sex and gender expression. More and more young people are being drawn to transgender identities, then getting railroaded into drastic and unnecessary transsexual surgeries and drug treatments, often at shockingly young ages.

This is, in my view and in the view of all my friends, a direct result of the pseudoscientific “gender identity” belief system and the systematic suppression of scientific facts by Gender Fundamentalists.

The biggest obstacle to the wellbeing of gender nonconforming and transgender people is not transphobia, it’s Gender Fundamentalism and the psychological harm such an incoherent, nonsensical worldview is doing to its adherents.

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PART FOUR

Who stands to gain, and who stands to lose, if the scientific truth gets out?

A big reason this topic is so incredibly divisive is that on both sides of the science-vs-superstition debate, the stakes are enormous — existential, even. Many vulnerable people are paying a terrible price for society’s faddish pretense that sex isn’t real. But the Gender Fundamentalists are ruthless in their persecution of dissidents because many in their camp stand to face catastrophic damage to their lives if (when) the truth comes out and this extreme belief system falls out of favour with the masses.

The left’s Vietnam: An unwinnable quagmire

There are powerful people with huge psychological and financial stakes invested in keeping the war against sex going. They’ve already invested so much in it, that to face the realization that such a huge investment was misplaced is too much to bear. So they’re doubling down, and they will keep doing so until they no longer can.

Logicians call this the sunk cost fallacy.

Critics of the US invasion of Vietnam popularized the term quagmire theory to describe this type of situation. A political side with good intentions becomes entrapped, one step at a time, by their own idealism and ideological stubbornness, until they find themselves inadvertently committed to fighting a war they didn’t actually want. Subsequently, they face the prospect that either outcome will be terrible.

Last year, the UK shut down its government-run youth gender clinic amid a massive scandal that made headlines and led to a bestselling exposé. Over 40 medical staff — a staggering number that never ceases to shock me — left the service and became whistleblowers, raising the alarm that many of the youth seeking medical treatment to change their bodies’ sex characteristics were trying to escape their homosexuality, and that the clinic’s management had become overrun with fundamentalist activists. There was a dark joke among staff that at the rate the movement was going, soon “there would be no gay people left.”

LGB… and T: gays and lesbians are disproportionately affected

The connection between cross-sex gender presentation and homosexuality is widely, intuitively understood in our society. Same-sex attracted people are far more likely to be naturally gender nonconforming from an early age. I was one such person. And it makes intuitive sense that some same-sex attracted people would gravitate towards cross-sex gender expression as they grow into adulthood, as one possible way to integrate themselves into the complex human social — and sexual — environment they inhabit.

You've seen it in films like The Crying Game and Boys Don't Cry. It surprises exactly no one that the transman in Boys Don't Cry wants to date a woman, and that the transwoman in The Crying Game enters into a relationship with a man.

The Crying Game and Boys Don’t Cry are two major films that depict Homosexual Transsexualism/Transgenderism.

Historically, their numbers were very small. Before social media, most gays and lesbians naturally reconciled the tension between their sex and their feelings about gender by adulthood. Over the course of puberty, they came to terms with their sexual orientation, and by extension, their sex.

Activists argue that the reason transsexuals were relatively rare in the past compared to now is because they suffered privately inside the transgender closet. But that’s plainly not the whole truth: the vast majority just came to terms with being gay. Think back to your own childhood. All those gender nonconforming classmates you went to school with, in the pre-social-media era? Virtually all of them are happily gay, middle-aged adults now. No surgeries needed.

Many gays and lesbians express their gender in creative and individualistic ways all through their lives. We’ve always been a proudly gender-bending community. But until social media came along, very few of us experienced such long-lasting mental anguish about our gender expression that we adopted transgender identities and underwent “sex change” treatments. Nowadays, the rate of medical interventions on gay & lesbian people’s bodies is so high, alarm bells are going off all over the world.

The wave of regret has begun

Increasing numbers of people are coming out as detransitioners, people who regret the medical therapies they feel they were misled or coerced into carrying out, under the influence of Gender Fundamentalism. Irreversible damage has been done to their bodies. Upon meeting some of them, the penny dropped for my acquaintance Helen Joyce, a former editor at The Economist who went on to write the bestselling book Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality and who now co-directs the advocacy group Sex Matters.

She put it this way: “Oh my God, they’re sterilizing gay kids.”

No more regrets: LGB and T people stand to gain from embracing the scientific truth

Imagine if all of a sudden, today, everyone abandoned fundamentalist “gender identity” beliefs and came back to understanding that sex is real, that gender expression is simply social or sexual signalling, and surgeries don’t literally change people’s sex.

Lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and transsexuals would immediately be in a far better position: with a realistic understanding of their own psychological and biological circumstances, they’d be better able to make informed decisions about their health. Far fewer people would find themselves in the agonizing position of regretting major life-changing surgeries.

Heterosexual males and transgender identity

But there’s another group of males, besides gays, who also have a long history of cross-sex gender expression (women’s clothes, hairstyles, feminine names, etc). The males in this cohort have a more complicated relationship between their sexualities and their transgender identities. And they’re highly sensitive about scientific scrutiny. They don’t want people prying into the motives and urges that lead them to become transgender. Their psychological condition can seem bizarre or unpleasant to outsiders, and they’re afraid that the wider public won’t understand or sympathize. The Gender Fundamentalist movement, with its prime directive, Don’t Ask Questions, suits them perfectly. Here’s what they’d rather not discuss:

A significant minority of straight men experience romantic and erotic pleasure through feminine gender expression. They cross-dress, they fantasize erotically about inhabiting female bodies, and increasingly, they take on full-time transgender and transsexual identities.

This group is very different from its homosexual transsexual male counterpart. Members in this group are more likely to come from stereotypically masculine, even macho, professions — military veterans, software engineers, bodybuilders, pro wrestlers. And they're far more likely to have exotic sex lives: they tend to participate in BDSM and other fetishistic sexual roleplay.

In 1985, HBO aired a groundbreaking documentary that explored the phenomenon, called “What Sex Am I?” Here’s a clip:

The kinky elephant in the room

Now, let’s not get prudish about the the link between transgender identity and erotic self-attraction. It’s been openly explored in cult films like The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Tim Burton’s Ed Wood — both of which are considered so tame by today’s standards, you can stream them right now on Disney+.

Ed Wood and The Rocky Horror Picture Show lightheartedly depict the kinky side of transgenderism.

Again, the science is well-established. The link between transgender identity and erotic attraction to one’s own body is no fringe theory. My friend Ray Blanchard coined the term that scientists now use to describe it, while he was doing groundbreaking research into transgenderism in the 1980s, right here in Toronto: he called it autogynephilia — which means something like, attraction to oneself as a female.

This group are causing problems in women’s spaces

We have to be realistic and we have to be honest: there are some members of this kinky subgroup within the broader transgender “umbrella” who are causing problems in women's spaces. From males who loiter in women's changing rooms and showers at gyms, pools, and community centres, to middle-aged males with hulking muscular frames signing up for young women’s sports teams, to males seeking employment in highly sensitive, women-only positions at women's shelters and girls' summer camps, to violent convicted rapists demanding to be transferred to women’s prisons.

Gabrielle Ludwig is a 50 year old male who joined a women’s college basketball team.

The complicated question of how society should address these males is at the heart of the conflict between the Gender Fundamentalists and campaigners for women’s rights.

But no one can address the problem as long as no one is permitted to acknowledge the fact that they are male.

There’s no question that this Oakville, Ontario high school teacher, who comes to class in gigantic prosthetic fetish breasts, is a problem. But the school board can’t properly address the problem because they can’t admit that this person is a male without being attacked by Gender Fundamentalists.

The real power behind the movement

It's this group, heterosexual males with sexual paraphilias (the scientific, sexological term for fetishes), who constitute most of the leadership of the Gender Identity religion. If mostly young, same-sex attracted people and their progressive supporters are the laity, much of gender extremism’s clergy — and certainly all of its Vatican Council — is composed of wealthy, straight, white males who would be understood to be fetishistic transvestites were it not for the protection from scrutiny that the gender identity belief system confers.

From left: Caitlyn Jenner, former Olympic champion and elder of the Kardashian clan; Admiral Rachel Levine, US Assistant Health Secretary; Jennifer Pritzker, billionaire & founder of the Pritzker Military Museum; Martine Rothblatt, entrepreneur & founder of Sirius XM Radio; Eddie Izzard, actor, celebrity, and UK Labour Party candidate. Wealthy males with autogynephilia lead the Gender Fundamentalist movement.

It's this group, straight males with sexual paraphilias, who are benefitting the most from Gender Fundamentalism, and who stand to lose the most if the mainstream public reverts back to a scientific understanding of sex and gender expression.

If everyone knew that they’re males with erotic attachments to feminine gender expression, public support for their demands to be allowed into women’s changing rooms, women’s prisons, women’s sports leagues, and lesbian social communities, would evaporate.

Why the stakes for women are so high

This is why so many women’s rights advocates have mobilized against gender fundamentalism. Not out of a hatred of gender nonconforming people, but a realistic understanding of the stakes for the safety and dignity of women and girls if society blindly allows anyone’s self-declared “gender identity” to override their biological sex across all of society without exception.

A fundamentally unstable system: conflicting interests within the trans community

So the transgender/transsexual “umbrella” consists mostly of two very different groups who actually have conflicting interests: homosexual and bisexual transsexuals on the one hand, and straight male autogynephiles on the other.

Lesbians, gays, and bisexuals who are gender nonconforming and who experience gender dysphoria would be far better served if everyone accepted the scientific, rational view of sex and gender. This would help them contextualize their feelings with regard to gender expression, find the most optimal ways to process them, and to manage their healthcare with a reduced risk of regret.

But broad acceptance of the scientific truth will force heterosexual males within the transgender community to admit that they’ve overstepped their bounds with respect to women’s spaces. They’ll have to endure some very uncomfortable conversations, to say the least.

This is why they are extremely motivated to suppress the truth. Hence, the campaign of “#NoDebate” and the unrelenting attacks on scientific realists like me and my friends, and most of all, on perfectly reasonable, sensible women’s rights campaigners.

JK Rowling is a model of human decency.

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PART FIVE

“Trans kids,” social contagion, and the medical scandal of the century

My heart breaks for the families caught up in this drama. They have become pawns in the Gender Identity Ideology movement’s political gamesmanship. The most crucial piece in the campaign to replace biological sex with “gender identity” and to silence their critics is the claim that “transgender identities” are sacred because they are innate, right from birth. To that end, they've sought out examples of inborn “transness” in children. Thus, the never-before-seen concept of the “transgender child” began to emerge, starting about twenty years ago.

Today, the very first cohort of children who were told from early childhood that they were born innately transgender is just coming into adulthood. Some are severely disabled due to experimental drugs and surgical procedures, which have scarred their genitals, brittled their bones, stunted their sexual function, and wrought havoc on their mental health.

They are disillusioned, unhappy, and they believe that they were medically abused and exploited in the service of adult activists' political objectives.

My friend Buck Angel, a transman, recently interviewed Briana Ivy, a transwoman. (Briana takes a neutral position on the pronoun debate; I will use masculine pronouns when referring to him in boyhood, and feminine pronouns when referring to her in her current, adult transwomanhood.) When Briana was a child, doctors told his family that his effeminate behavour was not a sign that he was most likely just a typical young gay boy — a latent homosexual — but instead a sign that he was a girl in need of medical assistance. With enough surgeries and drugs, they were promised, Briana’s body would be rendered truly, literally female, as Gender Identity Theory dictates it “should” be.

Now in her early twenties, Briana has no sexual feeling or function as a result of the experimental “puberty blocking” drugs she was given, and her genital area is disfigured and scarred from botched experimental surgeries. Briana has recently come to the realization that her family was misled by Gender Funamentalist doctors’ false promises:

Quacks and charlatans gone wild

“Youth transgender medicine” is a field that has isolated itself from proper medical oversight by wrapping itself in identity politics and hounding anyone with accusations of “transphobia” if they dare to scrutinize its medical practices. Unsurprisingly, because of its lack of oversight, it’s become a magnet for incompetent surgeons, sketchy drug peddlers, suspended doctors, pretend experts, fetishists, narcissists, misogynists, and miscellaneous shady pseudoscience merchants.

A private gender clinic that popped up in Mississauga, Ontario was criticized under the Medicine Act for aggressively advertising breast amputations to teen girls on social media. The clinic shot back with self-righteous claims about “LGBTQ+” victimhood, noting, too, that legally there is no age minimum for elective breast removal surgeries in Ontario. Children of any age can opt to remove their breasts and pay a private clinic to undergo the procedure. We never created a law to prohibit such a thing, because we never imagined the transgender craze would happen.

To say that this field is controversial is the understatement of all understatements.

My side of this debate says that one hundred years of science is clear: transsexualism is not an innate state of being. It's one possible medical treatment for a condition which has implications and consequences for our adult sexuality. As such, it should be undertaken with great caution, in concert with robust medical and psychological consultation, and it should wait until adulthood.

As I’ve explained, it's sometimes an alternative expression of homosexual or bisexual sexuality and sociality: extremely butch lesbian-ness or bisexuality, or extremely femme gay-ness. And it's sometimes an aspect of a complicated, fetishistic heterosexual sexuality. But in all cases, the decision to undergo medical procedures to permanently alter one's genitals and appearance in the service of a transsexual identity for life, is a very serious, adult decision.

A category mistake with homophobic implications

To conceptualize “transness” as something that can be detected and medically acted on in kids is a fundamental category mistake, and a profoundly homophobic one, as it designates gender nonconformity in kids as a condition in need of drastic medical intervention by default, and it encourages parents, sometimes unconsciously, to steer confused kids unnecessarily towards trans identities, and then to conceal from those kids that they’re being set up to become medical patients for the rest of their lives, with all the incumbent risks and side effects that entails.

Countless studies have been done, and every single one has confirmed it: very feminine boys and very masculine girls, even confused and distressed ones who seem in their childhood minds to be sure that they’re “really” the opposite sex, usually grow up to be happy, healthy gays & lesbians.

Now, such children are being put on a drastic, experimental medical pathway early on by default. They're sometimes taught that they're transgender as early as age 3, started on experimental drugs as early as age 7, and surgeries have happened in the US and Canada to kids as early as age 12.

This is, in my view as well as in the view of my transsexual friends, nothing short of the biggest medical scandal in history, unfolding right in front of our eyes.

The latest youth social contagion

Among teens and young adults, transgender identity has grown explosively. In addition to gays and lesbians, it has exploded among people with autism, and other mentally vulnerable or distressed people, such as trauma survivors, orphans in the foster care system, and girls with eating disorders and other body issues. These are the same demographics that were most impacted by social contagions of the past: the Satanic panic and the multiple personalities craze, for example.

Exploding numbers

In some parts of North America, as many as 10% of adolescents and children are now identified as transgender — a designation that was vanishingly rare before kids grew up with smartphones in their hands. It used to be closer to 1 in 25,000 adults, and it was unheard of in kids. I’ve heard rumors of classes in certain artsy schools where most, or even all of the students self-identify as transgender. This might be waved off as a harmless social phase akin to goth or emo — and at least among teen girls it mostly is — but many of these kids are getting swept into the transgender medical system, where the quacks who’ve eluded proper medical oversight are making huge profits giving these kids medical interventions that do grave harm to their bodies, which usually cause lifelong sterility, and which are utterly irreversible.

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PART SIX

Peak trans: the beginning of the end

Europe is sobering up. North America is next.

However, change is afoot: medical professionals and political leaders across Europe have been sounding the alarm and successfully reversing the course of the transgender craze. Progressive European countries such as Finland, Sweden, France, and the UK are rolling things back, shutting down some of the youth gender clinics that had opened amid the transgender craze, and restoring strict limits and oversight to medical treatment for gender distress in minors.

They are slowly awakening to the horrific realization that, what began as an attempt to show compassion to a vulnerable group — severely distressed young people, particularly gays & lesbians — had been co-opted by radical activists and taken to extremes. The people in charge were too convinced of their own progressive virtue to accept that something was wrong until it was too late for countless young people.

It’s not just kids’ gender care under review: every day more people who elected for surgeries as adults are suing their doctors for malpractice. Such lawsuits are beginning to happen here in Canada and the US, too.

Political polarization closes people’s minds in the US and Canada

Despite the gains we're making across Western Europe restoring sanity and science to the subject of medical “sex change,” in the US and Canada, our pleas can't yet be heard over the noise of the culture war.

Political polarization here seems to be darker, more divisive, and more deep-rooted than in Western Europe. The issue has become caught up in the bitter rivalry between Red and Blue states (and provinces), and the existential dread of a possible second Trump presidential term.

Many liberals and progressives just cannot pry their minds open even for a moment to think about this issue in an unbiased light. Their hearts are closed to us rational critics of Gender Fundamentalism, because they are afraid of the possibility that they might even appear to be in line with the dreaded right wing, even for a second.

I don’t entirely blame people for having such a hard time seeing the forest for the trees. The North American media landscape is severely biased right now. Every liberal-leaning outlet, from the CBC to MSNBC to the New Yorker, frames this issue as a fight against socially regressive conservatives, analagous to the gay rights struggle. They’re unwittingly playing directly into the hands of the fundamentalists.

I’ve never before seen a situation like this, where so much of the media is so utterly failing to properly report on so big an issue. That’s yet another reason this topic is so scary: it’s unprecedented, so much so that it’s hard to process. It’s hard for any lifelong liberal to find himself this far astray from the media-message-approved liberal consensus on a polarized issue. I know, because I am of course a lifelong liberal myself.

But, here we are. The facts simply don’t lie: there really is a crazy new social-media-fueled quasi-religious movement gaslighting everyone into pretending that sex isn’t real, it’s convinced an entire generation of youth that biological sex is some kind of right wing conspiracy, and it’s convinced parents to subject their children to experimental sex change treatments in an effort to prove that their religion is true.

I won’t stay silent

There’s one thought that scares me most of all about this upside-down situation we’ve all found ourselves in: if I were a kid growing up today, I would almost certainly have been raised to believe that I was a “trans girl” and targeted for experimental and irreversible medical procedures, because I strongly preferred girls’ toys and experienced distress about being a boy. I know for a fact that countless other gay and lesbian adults feel exactly the same way — afraid for the next generation of gays and lesbians — because I overheard so many of them say so while I was a bartender at a gay bar.

But they always said it cautiously, in whispered tones, nervous that if the wrong sort of person overheard, the gender-crazed witch hunters might single them out for cancellation, and shun them out of their social groups, maybe even their families and their jobs.

And they were right to be afraid.

Despite the risks, I couldn't keep quiet any longer while so many people were being harmed, so I stopped whispering and I started shouting about this. I’ve been incredibly fortunate to meet some of the most intelligent, interesting, warmhearted people in my life since I got involved in this war. But too many of my “civilian” friends have turned their backs on me for getting involved.

One thing I can assure you is this: the hyperpartisan culture war climate can't go on forever, and when it quiets down, the voices of Gender Fundamentalism’s victims will be heard. And they will be demanding to know why you didn't do anything to help them. When your children grow up, they will be asking you: what were you doing when the terrible scandal of the transgender craze was unfolding all around you?

I promise you: in retrospect, it’ll all seem so incredibly obvious how ridiculous the Gender Fundamentalists were. How foolish it was to make everyone state their pronouns all the time. How unhinged it was that kindergarten teachers were teaching toddlers that male and female are imaginary constructs you feel in your heart, rather than hard, cold facts of the body you’re born with that you have to learn to accept. How clear it was that so many transwomen were just kinky crossdressers exploiting people’s naïvety. How horrifying it was that we were chemically blocking children’s puberties and surgically experimenting on their bodies. How embarrasing it was that you joined in the shunning of the people who had the guts to point out that the Emperor has no clothes.

Looking back, it will be so clear that this was a disastrous fad that was never going to last, “like evil bell bottoms,” as my friend joked. Only I don’t think you’ll be laughing, because this fad has done uspeakable damage to society, especially some of its most vulnerable young people.

When this insanity is finally behind us, I’ll be able to look back and say with confidence that I did the right thing. I heeded the call when a grave injustice demanded that I muster the courage to fight it.

I'll leave you to ponder whether you'll be able to say the same. You certainly can’t plead ignorance and claim that you didn’t know what was going on, that you didn’t have all the facts. Because I just gave them to you.