Trans Kayfabe: immersive fiction taken to the extreme

The first rule of AGP Club is: you do not talk about AGP Club.

Action figures of Terry Bollea and André René Roussimoff in character as their wrestling personas, Hulk Hogan and André the Giant.

(Update: I’ve published a follow-up piece to this. The link is posted at the bottom of this piece, as well as here.)

There’s some lively discussion over at Butterflies and Wheels about trans identity and the encouragement of role-playing in children, and it’s spurred me to finally publish this piece, which I’ve been meaning to write for a while.

Ophelia Benson said,

That’s

Kathleen Stock

’s insight: that people who call themselves trans are immersed in a dangerous fiction. Immersion in fiction can be a fine thing, and it can be a harmless thing, but if it gets hooked into a fad for “validating” the fiction as rock-solid truth…not so much.

What’s worse is that the kids don’t yet know what kind of fiction they’re getting immersed into. Some of the adults playing along with this fiction have their own agenda, and the kids aren’t being let in on it.

To many adult men, transgender identity is a special kind of immersive fiction, distinct from, say, the nerdy hobby of live action role-playing (LARPing).

Larpers get together in groups, and enact their roleplaying personas only when they’re among their peers in the groups. They revert to their real selves when interacting with people outside the group, or when they’re not actively “in session.”

But trans is more like kayfabe. This is a word that came into use at the turn of the last century, when “professional” wrestling emerged among the travelling carnivals and sideshows that roved the American frontier. (Its etymology is unclear, but it’s probably derived from pig latin for “be fake.”)

Kayfabe is like the reverse of larping: you can let your guard down and be your true self only when you’re alone with your in-group peers. In the presence of outsiders you must always maintain the illusion that your roleplaying persona is real.

“Professional” wrestling came from the Carnies who roved the American frontier. Their subculture relied on the fabrication of fantastic life stories and dramatic conflicts, and they guarded their backstories’ fictitousness from outsiders. This parallels today’s trans culture in many ways.

Wrestlers concocted elaborate fictional backstories and soap opera-like rivalries to generate excitement and draw crowds to their (rigged, performative) bouts. Their livelihoods came to depend on keeping up the illusion that these personas were real; if word got out that they were faking it, the whole profession could collapse for loss of an audience. So wrestling culture developed a strange alternate reality of its own, whose pretence was guarded with a solemn code of silence.

“Pro” wrestling continues to this day, and the omertà of kayfabe was strictly maintained for decades until as recently as 1989, when executives from the World Wrestling Federation, facing athletic regulation laws, testified before the New Jersey state senate and publicly admitted for the first time that wrestling superstars like Hulk Hogan and André the Giant were, in fact, paid entertainers and not professional athletes. Up until then, many of the wrestlers’ own relatives were kept in the dark about how fake the whole thing was. Today, it’s hard to imagine how seriously it used to be taken, but I can recall lively schoolyard arguments about “Rowdy” Roddy Piper and the Hulkster’s rivalry. Wrestling’s kayfabe was until the ‘90s genuinely, truly believed by many kids and adults alike.

Fetishistic, autogynephilic trans-identifying men are just like pro wrestlers in this regard. When they’re alone with each other they’re completely open about being fetishistic men, and they make and share pornographic videos with each other, etc. (I know this because they’re increasingly horning in on gay men’s dating and hookup apps — the ones that are seedier and more underground than Grindr — where they’re not shy about sharing their kinks.) But in the presence of outsiders, ma’am’s the word, as it were. The lie must be maintained or the whole enterprise could collapse: no more unfettered access to women’s spaces and no more power to force everyone else to play along with their fantasies.

A clear example of a trans person keeping his autogynephilic reality private while maintaining a public kayfabe is Lia Thomas. You can see it in his social media. His public Instagram account is full of the usual guff about protecting trans kids, trans women are women, bla bla bla… But he has a second, private Instagram account which he shares with his inner circle, where he apparently lets his kayfabe guard down and is much more candid about the fact that he’s a man with a fetishistic sexual appetite. (A strange quirk of Instagram is that supposedly private accounts aren’t actually all that private: you can hide your posted pictures from the general public, but you can’t conceal your username, profile photo, profile details, which other accounts follow you, or the “likes” you apply to other people’s posts and photos. In Lia’s case, this information has shown that he apparently uses his “private” secondary account to share and interact with content about autogynephilia and fetishism.)

All of this is to say that the AGP Club members aren’t upfront that it’s all kayfabe when they’re targeting children and their families while “in character,” and the institutions that back them are at least partially complicit in the lie. (WPATH is notoriously riddled with “academics” who are privately involved in extreme fetish clubs — see, for example, the Eunuch Archive.) The wider public aren’t being let in on the scheme.

This can and will be devastating to a lot of children (and their families) when they grow up and realize that many of the people leading the “trans community” were conspiring all along in a lie to serve their personal, private sexual fantasies.

UPDATE: I’ve added a PART 2! Read it below. (But first, share this piece, and consider subscribing? Thank you!)