You're facing the wrong way, Freddie

Freddie deBoer needs to turn around and look at the left in order to understand the gender debate.

If any character from the 1987 film Mannequin represents modern gender ideology, it’s the security guard Captain Maxwell: a homophobic, misogynist man obsessed with the uniform he wears and the associated power it gives him to lord control over others.

This is an open open letter to Substack writer Freddie deBoer.

Freddie,

Although you and I have never met or spoken, we did both participate in the virtual Free Speech and the Left conference last year. So we’re only one or two degrees of separation. I’m a gay, liberal-minded Canadian/American and I work to protect and defend gender nonconforming men and women, people just like the beloved character Hollywood from the ‘80s comedy Mannequin, who you used to frame your disastrous essay about the gender debate.

(I think Mannequin is a gloriously goofy and surprisingly subversive movie which I’ve loved since I was a kid, and it’s one of only five films I’ve ever bought on DVD.)

Here's a thought experiment for you, Freddie: imagine if the entire Republican party collapsed overnight, and every single American — every single one — voted straight Democrat down every ballot from today onwards. A one-hundred percent progressive, Democratic America. You think it’d be a utopia for lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and transsexuals?

It wouldn’t be.

Going by the policies that are being promoted by Democrats today: gender nonconforming Americans — men like the fictional Hollywood Montrose — would immediately be far, far worse off. In fact, such an imaginary situation would be catastrophic for LGB & T people. It would be catastrophic for women & girls, too, so extreme and dangerous are the policies espoused by progressives today.

I can’t stress this enough, Freddie: this isn’t a battle about how to “be kind” to gender nonconforming people. At all.

You’re very good at critiquing the left, but on this issue you’re looking the wrong way, focussed on combating ideas about sex and gender that mostly stem from the traditional right, and you’re blind to the dangers of the new paradigm around sex and gender that snuck up behind all of us from the left.

There is a bizarre New Religious Movement infecting the left at the moment, and it’s preying on the real live men who are like the fictitious Hollywood Montrose, and their female counterparts, drawing them in droves to medical procedures which are dangerous, often experimental, and which all evidence shows come with an enormous and growing risk of severe regret. I recently lost a friend to suicide following the realization that the transsexual surgery he underwent had been sold to him through lies and false promises.

Hollywood Montrose is a man. A brash, sassy, utterly fabulous (fictional) feminine gay man. If you care about men like him, encourage them first and foremost to love themselves just the way they are, and work to make them feel safe and welcome in your spaces — men’s spaces.

I can’t think of anything less compassionate, less caring, than turning a blind eye while countless young, flamboyant and wonderful gay men not unlike Hollywood get lured into a belief system that says they can’t be their true selves unless they take synthetic hormones, get silicone breasts, and have their penis and testicles removed and replaced by a surgical facsimile of a vagina — ideally before they’re even old enough to apply for a driver’s license.

But you don’t seem to care. To you, all that matters is that you’re cool with the rainbow folk, and whatever happens inside the Alphabet Club is nobody’s business but “their” own, and you’re sure it’s fine. Nevermind that staggering, never-before-seen numbers of same-sex attracted people’s bodies are being medically, irreversibly altered. Nevermind the endless stream of whistleblowers shouting to anyone who’ll listen that this looks like the largest medical scandal in history. Nevermind the escapees shouting that a bizarre cult has taken over the once-tiny medical field of treatment for the once-vanishingly-rare condition of mental distress relating to gender expression and the sex of one’s body. Apparently you know better than the people who devoted their lives to gender nonconforming people and are now appalled at what they’re seeing. As long as you know in your heart that you like feminine men more than Republicans do, who cares about the details that follow, amirite?

Freddie, I need to remind you: up until yesterday “trans” did not mean “gender nonconforming,” nor “gender nonconforming with an identity label to match my personality,” it meant gender nonconforming and so severely distressed about it that I require drastic medical interventions in order to cope and survive.

The biggest threat to gender nonconforming people today is not the conservative right anymore, Freddie. And it’s not too-online “heterodox” reactionaries, either. It's the unhinged beliefs flourishing on the left, which took root because the culture war has turned liberal Americans' brains into mush, some of which has affected your own mind. The American left’s purity spiral is like an autoimmune disorder: the mechanism designed to protect vulnerable populations has gone haywire and is now attacking the host. And evidently you’re affected, too.

It doesn’t seem to have clicked with you yet that vast swathes on the left have genuinely abandoned the concept of biological sex altogether. Like, really, truly, deeply. They look at a statement like this, a plain, incontrovertible statement of basic facts of biology, and they reject it outright, or they think it’s some kind of trick:

This is dangerous, Freddie. It’s not a trivial matter of technicalities. We really don’t need to get into the weeds about sex-chromosome disorders. The widespread obfuscation of the facts of biological sex is the thing that is misleading droves of people to identify as different “gender identities” and to undergo medical treatments. They’re being lied to, Freddie, and they’re being harmed. It’s as simple as that.

The way you don’t seem to understand that you’re siding with people who literally don’t believe in biological sex reminds me of the way that well-meaning entrants into Scientology don’t understand that their higher-ups really literally believe in the Evil Galactic Lord Xenu. You’ve noticed a lot of talk about some kind of galactic federation, but you’re still writing it off and rationalizing it away. The penny hasn’t yet dropped for you how many of the people around you mean that shit completely, utterly, and literally, even though what they actually believe is completely incoherent if it’s examined in detail.

You said, “there are many people in the world whose felt, lived, intrinsic, internal, or otherwise experienced gender identity does not match with the sex category of their birth.” But what you can’t seem to grasp is that they feel that “mismatch” so strongly because they’ve been coerced to, largely by the Internet. There have always been feminine men and masculine women; but the postmodern “self-conception” (your term) of “gender identity” and the widespread craze that’s ravaging the gay & lesbian communities is as new as the iPhone. Again, Freddie, I was there, and you weren’t. I’m a gender nonconforming gay man who had dysphoria. I’ve worked in the gay community for decades. It was never like this before, gender nonconforming people never used to “self-conceptualize” this way — not even most of the old-school transsexuals, who recognized they were a rare exception and their condition was not common, nor should it ever be — and the change is not for the best. Gay & transsexual people’s mental health regarding their gender expression is worse than it’s ever been.

Everyone’s plainly doing worse, not better, thanks to “gender identity.” Let that sink in.

And besides, the driver behind gender identity madness isn’t “intrinsically” gender nonconforming people anyway. It’s straight, mostly wealthy, mostly white, men with autogynephilia: otherwise masculine, even macho, straight guys who are turned on by their own bodies. “My dick is bigger than yours and my tits are bigger than your girlfriend’s,” as Jamie Lee Curtis’s crossdressing son likes to say. I’ve been around trans people for decades, Freddie. They’re mostly straight dudes, they’re mostly (though often secretly) kinksters, and the big push to put “gender identity” ahead of biological sex is driven largely by a small group of straight men’s out-of-control erotic compulsions to access women’s spaces. Here’s a clip from an HBO documentary from 1985:

If any character from the film Mannequin represents modern gender extremism, it’s the security guard Captain Maxwell: a homophobic, misogynist man obsessed with the uniform he wears and the associated power it gives him to lord control over others.

Your dismissive attitude about the rates of medicalization among young people and gender nonconforming people in general is testament to the fact that you don’t really care about men like Hollywood at all. You care to be seen as enlightened about them, but you’re utterly cold to the sounds coming from the gender abattoirs, and the armies of whistleblowers screaming for someone to stop the madness. Have a listen to this:

Here’s another thought experiment for you, Freddie: think of your own cock. That should be easy enough for you.

It’s awfully easy for you to dismiss concerns about the health and wellness of other people’s bodies, when you “conceptualize” gender nonconforming people as so other, so alien to dudebros like you, that the way you describe “them” — us — makes us sound so intrinsically tragic you can’t fathom us living happily just as we are. You, like so many straight, gender-conforming men, therefore don’t hear the alarm bells. You don’t deeply grasp like we do the fact that medical interventions should rightly be treated as incredibly high-risk, serious procedures and not just little cosmic “corrections” to fit “them” into the boxes you just assume we’d all feel more “naturally” in. We only started feeling unnatural in our own bodies when men like you started suggesting that we should.

So how about you put your own skin in the game. If it turns out you’re wrong and there is a massive wave of gender nonconforming people who’ve been misled and horribly, irreversibly harmed by gender identity extremism, how about you surgically give up your own cock in solidarity with the men who’ve lost theirs, and the women whose bodies have been harmed, too? You did, after all, play a part in perpetuating the madness. You have a rather large platform and you’re using it to defend the current situation. If there’s a zero percent chance you’re wrong, there’s a zero percent chance you lose your cock. If, on the other hand, there’s a less-than-zero chance that you’re wrong…

Snippy-snippy.

Is that what it takes to get men like you to finally pay attention to what so many women and gays and clinicians and old-school transsexuals have been shouting about for years? You can’t be bothered to really care about the issues that affect us unless we make them about you and your cock?

I guess so.