I. Introduction
First and foremost, this is not some sort of admission that walking away from my trans persona was a bad idea. It was the best idea I’ve had in my life, and pretty perfectly balances out the poor decision it was to transition in the first place. This is also not a confession that some people are better off transitioning, or that I have been mistaken in my efforts to convince people that it is almost always a case of deranged cope.
Rather, the purpose of this essay is to sketch out the limitations of the concept with regard to the political battle against transgenderism. The first and foremost of the limitations is simply that much like no one can physically “transition” to the opposite sex, no one can “detransition” from the opposite sex either. But additionally, there is no undoing what’s already been done. Even if someone hasn’t medicalized, there is no gaining back that time, those months or years of struggle and self-destruction. They may make one stronger or weaker in the long run, but those lost years are lost for good, along with any broken hearts or psyches resulting from it. However temporary the phase may have been, the damage is permanent, and something one must live with for the rest of their days.
But there are criticisms other than the literal interpretation of what “detransition” could mean, arguably far more relevant than its semantics.
II. Criticism of “Detransitioning” as a Verb
There isn’t really anything unique about coming out of a trans identity compared to recovering from any other kind of serious trauma, identity crisis, etc. What is done to people who are not in their right minds (or are children) is abominable and it’s all done in the name of some nihilistic endeavor, but at the end of the day it’s still ultimately just another trauma in a life full of them. I realize people burnt-out on hearing the word “trauma,” (and “burnt out” for that matter) but that’s what it is. Even if as a response to trauma, trauma victims like to retraumatize themselves because it’s a familiar feeling they feel competent in navigating, compared to actually working through it in hopes of returning to baseline.
“Detransitioning” esotericizes the process of healing from human catastrophes, placing it apart from similar processes that victims of any other kind of trauma must contend with. While the contours of the traumatic response are different depending on the trauma itself (and the severity of it), as well as the baseline neuroticism of the person whose experienced it, “detransitioning” for most people who do it merely describes working through that trauma. While still obviously complicated, it isn’t any more complicated than that.
But that’s not all that “detransitioning” entails. In fact, most people would omit this from the definition entirely. For most, it’s just “leaving trans identity behind,” nothing more, nothing less. But this on its own doesn’t really help anything. It’s a good first step, but it’s not the most pivotal. It might symbolize the beginning of that path, but that really isn’t the hard part — it’s what comes next that’s more difficult. The emphasis on “detransitioning” i.e., giving up trans identity as the be-all and end-all for people who need to do it stunts “detransitioners’” growth. The important part is addressing the danger for what it was, fixing the destructive behaviors that led to succumbing to it, and acknowledging pains from the past. That’s the hard part. Anyone can throw out ill-fitting clothes and stop picking up pharmacy scripts.
III. Criticism of The Detrans Identity Itself
The self-claimed identity of a “detransitioner” is steeped in victimhood mentality and in some circles grants the claimant an undeserved position of authority on insights regarding the transgender cult. While it’s true that many who had a transgender phase went through some harrowing stuff, and that much of the blame does rest on the institutions and sex criminals which groomed them, there is no way out of that very personal pain other than taking accountability for their own inability to safeguard themselves, regardless of how significant the abuse was, however young they were, and however many other people let them down.
To say this is not to blame the victim. While it’s understandable that, in the case of children specifically, it would be years before they ever develop the ability to take responsibility for themselves, the reality is that they must learn this if they are to heal from any kind of traumatic damage at all. Life itself is traumatic, a series of little crises which can only be mediated by the people experiencing them. This isn’t to say that fault lies with them, especially not if they were children, or otherwise unable to make responsible decisions for whatever reason. However, they must still reflect on the decisions they’ve made; the people they trusted, the lies they believed, the warning signs they let go either because they never learned to look for them or because they deliberately ignored them. Claiming “detrans” can hinder this process.
There are substantial numbers of detransitioners who have come out of the woodwork to “share their stories.” Criticism of the outlets which hunt for these sorry individuals will be reserved for the following section. The criticism here is for those individuals who willingly and repeatedly stick themselves in front of the camera, or onto Twitter, or start Substacks doing deep dives into the trans question from the perspective of yet another dime-a-dozen detransitioner.
This is as much a self-criticism as it is a criticism of others. Whatever it is I say about them can (though not necessarily does) apply to me as well. What does and what doesn’t is up to you, I don’t really care.
The trouble is that very few people are able to articulate the experience well enough to sketch a clear picture of the whole thing, from the individual perspective to the robust social network(s) which propel it. Most of their stories sound eerily similar, which is useful in the sense that it allows us to pinpoint a specific set of traits or phenomena which link individual cases, but is also limiting. The extent to which their stories reflect their own experiences or the explanations of others that they’ve picked up while in the depths of their coping is unclear.
I’ve mentioned this before on Twitter in my own case. Before I had even walked back my transition, I was on podcasts and writing articles about my experience as it was still happening, as I was still reeling. I did not have easy answers, nor had I even committed to walking it all back. I was confused and I hoped that by reaching out to people someone would come along who could help. A couple of therapists reached out, one who I saw infrequently for a few months, but that was about it. I had to figure it out myself. I think a lot of people are in a similar situation, putting themselves out into the ether in hope that they will find a community of people or professionals with experience in their particular situation.
However, this makes them unreliable. They are often not quite stable and looking for validation that their struggle is real rather than simply experiencing the struggle for what it is. They are likely to regurgitate whatever it is their newfound community says about this or that topic surrounding transition, detransition, and the like. They are likely to adopt certain aspects of prior narratives to their own lives, just as they did with people’s trans narratives before they transitioned. They are not likely to come to these conclusions themselves, which makes them unreliable narrators not just to the viewer but also to themselves. Their insights are not novel, often not surprising (or even interesting), and not really useful other than as an additional narrative to heap atop the pile of other damaged people who’ve gone through the same thing. In other words, they are more useful as a statistic than as a subject.
The extent to which this applies to me is subjective, depending on whether you like my writing, agree with my position regarding transgenderism, or believe me when I say I’ve left this all behind. I’d like to believe I have more interesting or incisive things to say on the subject (and others) than most; some may disagree. The size of my following compared to others running the same grift does not really indicate whether it’s interesting or incisive, just whether I’m better or worse at capitalizing on it. That is a different metric.
My own critics may claim that by making this criticism, I’m trying to edge out all of the other detransitioners jockeying for attention, to which I would say that may well be the case, but you won’t find me frequenting the same haunts that usually platform these tearful autobiographies. You also won’t find me revisiting my experiences in extravagant detail beyond what I’ve already released for public consumption. As is the case with most of my writing, I am more focused on analysis than on individual accounts or moralization.
Another criticism which may be levied is that in saying that they are unoriginal or repetitive, I am being pretentious, that my ego is showing, that I’m unfairly putting down all these other people with just as much value in what they have to say. Maybe so, but they are by and large unlikely to have produced the body of work that I’ve produced since starting this newsletter. This is what I mean by them not being incisive enough; for the most part, those who claim detrans identity view the issue through their eyes, through their experiences, through their identitarian lenses, whether that lens becomes homosexual, autistic, “gender nonconforming” or other. They do not zoom out to the civilizational view, they reduce the issue down to moral claims, and many are all too eager to lend pity and sympathy to transgender activists who thinly conceal their true intentions only because they lend minor support for curtailing the most brutal excesses of the movement. This is a consequence of holding fast to the detrans moniker, of being so close to the issue and remaining so long after the fact.
IV. Criticism of The Detrans Media Machine
The only real weapon in the detransitioner’s arsenal, politically speaking, is to play up the medical malpractice claims, the grooming by cult-like cells of trans activists, the exploitation by mental health professionals, and other such similar issues.
Doing this for an audience consistently over an extended period of time prevents (in most people) the ability to form the sense of responsibility and instinctual self-preservation which was lacking in the first place. In order to be a media-friendly detransitioner, they must retain and defend their victimhood in the face of their critics and other members of their political coalition. They must consistently provoke the ire of their transsexual critics (admittedly not very hard to do) while courting the pity and sympathy of their orbiters and allies. Doing exposes how deranged the transsexual activists are, but it also exposes the detransitioner him/herself to a constant stream of vitriol, unwarranted criticism, and prying into their personal lives which makes it ever harder to leave the victim mentality and substantively heal from the damage of their transgender past.
Additionally, this media sphere’s audience consists primarily of middle-aged women (many of them mothers) and derives its bread and butter from an endless supply of trauma porn this audience consumes for a whole host of reasons. They are the aggregators of images of phalloplasties and vaginoplasties, of mastectomies on teens riddled with self-harm scars, and of course, of detransitioner narratives. While certainly incensing, this style of propaganda outlet again can only generate pity. It plays on the intense emotions such images bring out, be it disgust, anger, sadness, or otherwise.
These images and narratives provide excellent fodder for well-produced propaganda hitpieces against trans (and no, I am not afraid to call it propaganda; propaganda itself is merely a tool, not an epithet), but when the sole function of these outlets is to connect disparate social media users with the most revolting, enraging, depressing scenes from this movement, emotion blinds the consumer from being able to form a coherent response to it beyond the initial instinct. The trauma porn itself, the emotional stories recounted by victims and therapists alike, does not produce a substantive political response. Viewing this content produces only one thing for certain, and that is more of it.
More engagement leads to more posts and even more outlets where these posts are viewable. The widespread censorship of these images and stories is certainly a problem. It does prevent vulnerable people from seeing the likely outcomes of their attempt to resolve severe internal distress. It also prevents people who are otherwise cautiously optimistic about trans from seeing the procedures for what they are. I am not suggesting that these posts be obliterated from the internet. Again, I see their utility and I think they have a place in criticizing trans. My problem is with the outlets that do nothing but disseminate them for attention, and with the audience who does nothing but consume it just to feel superior about their own disgust towards such obviously disgusting operations.
An echo chamber is an echo chamber is an echo chamber, and they are not spaces within which productive conversation can be had. They are, just like the trans spaces, extremely emotional, histrionic, and performative places where people (again, mostly women) compete to out-sympathy each other, or if they’re men, out-outrage each other. There is little actual meat on those bones, but just the flavor of it is enough to drive people feral.
V. Criticism of The Detrans Political Coalition
1. Intro
The coalition “detransitioners” find themselves a part of is eerily similar to the coalition which pushed transgenderism in the first place. Among them are therapists, sexologists, homosexual activists, radical feminists, and even self-avowed transsexuals who smuggle in their own left-wing interpretation of the transgender epidemic, and their similarly left-wing prescriptions for dealing with it. However, that left-wing critique is quickly becoming the right-wing standard, as it critiques to most severe excesses (child transition, indoctrination in schools, LGBTQ everything, etc.) while bolstering its premises (legal fictions surrounding sex changes, the embrace of homosexuality as some sort of time-honored tradition, a legal and medical basis for continuation of these procedures on adults, etc.).
The “detransitioned” for the most part belong to this coalition and balk at social conservatives who had it right from the beginning but who have thus far been unable to form any cohesive political response to it. Those “detransitioners” who have found solace on the dissident or “schizo” right-wing tend to fall into a similar political theater as the leftism that is usually inherent in transgender identity, albeit now for the other side. They engage in the same neurotic histrionics, but with “based” concerns rather than “soy,” to use the parlance.
2. Therapists
Many of the therapists in the “anti-woke” “detrans ally” sphere were themselves gender-affirming therapists before they had a change of heart. This phrasing is important, because if it were a change in mind, it would have occurred on some sort of rationalist or scientific basis. Instead, it happened because the group they pitied moved from one, the “trans,” to the other, the “detrans,” or more broadly, any trans-identified person who suffered greater ego dystonia as a result of their “treatment.”
Hopping from one group to the other is easier than it may seem considering they are ultimately the same group, and these therapists’ services will be coveted by them in growing numbers. The gender therapists who make this switch early enough have put their name out there loudly enough as activists taking up the detrans banner are making a serious play for a relatively new and lucrative demographic of patients. Is it that easy, considering their type of practice is considered illegal “conversion therapy” in several states? No, it’s not easy, but neither is anything else. It’s easier than finding a new career, to be sure.
Politically, they play only a minor role. They provide some semblance of scientific rigor to the “anti-woke” side of things, as well as great media fodder via the “change-of-heart” stories. You very rarely hear from any therapists who were against the whole thing from the get-go making such a play, or who openly condemned the “conversion therapy” bans as they were happening — it’s all after the fact. They may still agitate against those bans in hindsight, and they may agitate against DSM revisions which seek to mask the dangers inherent in treating cross-sex identification as a normal state of mind, but otherwise, they are not very useful as anything other than a potential voting bloc for Republicans. Many call themselves “politically homeless,” which is really just code for “temporarily embarrassed Democrats,” although the Republicans’ noticeable leftward shift on most issues in the last few years may prevent them from returning to that particular plantation.
Middle-class professionals with advanced degrees are the hottest commodity in electoral politics. Control just the barest sliver of this bloc, you win the handful of contestable seats needed to gain the majorities necessary to ram through partisan legislation. These professionals flirt with joining the Republicans, but most don’t go so far as to pledge any kind of support for them, especially not for Trump. They spend a substantial amount of time moaning about how the Left isn’t hearing them, which suggest to me they wish they could remain Democrats, if not for this one obstacle. This does have quite an effect on local races and the lengths Republicans may go to capture otherwise left-liberal voters.
3. Sexologists
Similar to but distinct from therapists are the sexologists, in this case, the Blanchardians, name taken from Dr. Ray Blanchard whom I have mentioned previously. Blanchard and his acolytes wrote extensively on their observations of two very different camps of transsexual; one the “HSTS,” or homosexual transsexual, the other the “AGP,” or autogynephile transsexual. This was treated up until recently as a very rigid distinction. The former was just an effeminate gay boy who could never stack up to becoming a man (so the theory goes), the latter being a heterosexual man with a sexual predilection for pretending to be a woman.
While Blanchard’s theories may have had substantial grounding back before transsexualism was a widespread social contagion, I believe this not to be so much the case any longer, and indeed I believe that he overlooked the extent to which the HSTS was also motivated by a very powerful male sexual drive (one not directed towards women, still just as powerfully towards “being” a woman). There are too many confounding variables in the cohorts which exist today, ranging from all manner of media manipulation, social media contagion, and institutional malfeasance. I will explore my criticisms of Blanchard more in a later essay.
Other sexologists, and indeed Blanchard himself, have the opportunity to throw themselves into the public discourse and workshop their theories to fit modern phenomena. They have the opportunity to write books, to schedule appearances, and otherwise raise their profiles in academia and media. The irony of this, of course, is that their whole model relies on conducting studies that need not be conducted, and exists solely as a scientific basis upon which to make policy decisions which subvert the ones that mass culture had already decided via organic means. Most people in the 1990s were already aware that transsexuals were weird sex freaks. If you doubt this, just watch Mrs. Doubtfire. Blanchard and company merely confirmed this with phallometry while at the same time encouraging the castrations and social re-engineering as a solution to the problem these fetishists have.
This is the issue with every manner of sexologist coming out of the woodwork in this coalition. They will use this issue to show that they are rational, reasonable, and guided by scientific principles. They will raise their public profiles, they will network with academics and media outlets, and they will then use these platforms to pitch love and acceptance for the next generation of perverts they’ve been studying. This is already the case with noted Blanchardian James Cantor, who advocates that we all have sympathy for pedophiles on the basis that there are so-called “ethical pedophiles” who do not offend, i.e., rape children.
That this group of activist researchers has attached themselves to the Detrans Question makes it hard to trust this coalition to advance policy which actually does limit the proliferation of sexual disorders in public.
4. Homosexual Activists
The most common refrain among gay detransitioners and associated homosexuals, whether of the “based” or left-liberal variety, is that transgenderism is “homophobic.” Their problem with it is that it is “regressive,” that it is a form of “conversion therapy,” that people are “transing the gay away.” They make ahistorical claims that trans and the rest of the rainbow alphabet have nothing to do with one another, that in fact they were always diametrically opposed; this is obviously false, but there is a reason why they make these claims and why they now agitate so harshly against transgenderism.
Firstly, it’s the fact that they did indeed (and largely still do; gays are among the most pro-trans populations in the US) agitate for “trans rights” right up to the late 2010s, if not as late as the 2020s. For the most part, and I realize they’re among the most likely to jump down my throat about this at this point, they are trying to make up for their advocacy for what has become a child mutilation cult while also not losing any of the privileges (not rights) they’ve gained in the lead-up to the ascension of said cult. They are also attempting to distance themselves from the predatory nature of transsexualism today, despite the fact that 10 years ago, they were still viewed as harboring predators and being sexually deviant themselves.
The thing is, gay men absolutely are still sexually deviant and there are proportionally far more sexual predators among gay men than among the rest of the population. This may sound offensive to some but think about it logically. Men are already highly sexual beings compared to women. Men who are attracted to women are mostly limited by women’s lower, functionally different libido and the greater risks and responsibilities sex has for them (namely pregnancy). Men who are attracted to men have no such limitations. It is a bottomless well of libido. There is nothing to balance that level of sexual energy out, and since it can be sated on demand with pretty much whomever they want, whenever they want, however they want, it can only take them deeper down that well. This isn’t to say women don’t have their own sex drive but because it’s different (and complementary), men who actually try to adjust to women’s sex drive makes them less prone to deranged fetish. Likewise for women, albeit again, I stress the qualitative (not just quantitative) difference.
It’s not just gay men; gay women, however low their libido may be, are still more likely to have bizarre fetishes purely by the nature of the fact that homosexual behavior itself is deviant from the norm, and may only be downstream from already-existing sexual deviance. This has certainly been the case in some of my experience with lesbians, especially those who have taken it on as a political identity more so than as a consequence of possibly inherent traits. That’s really all that “deviant” means, after all, and it seems this has been forgotten. It need not be a moral judgement but there should still be a discretion between what is and is not the norm.
They do not want to admit that the increasing acceptance and celebration of gay lifestyles has had net negatives for the rest of society, and that living that lifestyle, however unavoidable it may seem, has net negatives for them as well. Part of contemporary culture’s more bizarre turns, a turn I’ve watched unfold throughout my short lifetime, is having to tiptoe around or outright lie about the extent to which these choices do harm the people making them. While, yes, people can be pretty harsh towards younger people who exhibit same-sex attraction, the reality is that most of what makes same-sex attraction difficult to navigate are the contradictions and dangers inherent to it, not merely the external revulsion to it. It may not be a choice to experience this attraction, but it is a choice to consummate that attraction and to do so in risky ways.
I’m not suggesting that people who experience this attraction should always choose not to; it’s not really my place nor is it my problem. They’ve always existed, and truthfully, sexuality is at least a little bit malleable based on social context (which is in part why there is so much sexual confusion and frustration today). The problem is that they are celebrated, that they have a vaunted place in society which is entirely based on their participation in same-sex sexual acts, and all the risks associated with them — including the potential breeding ground for predators — are downplayed or outright concealed. It is to the point that their very identity, their very concept of self, comes from the kind of sex they’re having above virtually anything else.
Those who are adamant about the dangers also moralize the issue far too much. If criticism of it remains merely a matter of moral failure, then of course people who naturally gravitate towards it aren’t going to pay attention, especially not predators. There are real functional concerns (including political ones) often concealed by overzealous, histrionic outrage.
Regardless, detrans is being used as a vehicle to continue this trend of homosexual celebration beyond the lifespan of the trans trend. The narcissism of some of these homosexual activists is palpable. They insist that the problem really is that they are attacking gay children specifically, or that this is borne purely from right-wing ideological considerations of normal, parallel social development for boys and girls. They don’t consider it possible that sexually abusing children and warping their understanding of their own bodies may make them more prone to act out deviant sexual behaviors. They just want to be the center of attention as always, which is only normal in a society which already does place them there. While there are some evangelical extremists who “trans the gay away” in their children, the reality is that for every one of them, there are, if you’ll excuse the vulgarity, five gay public school teachers, social workers, therapists, etc. ramming trans pride flags up their students’ asses.
Anti-trans gays only distance themselves from these people via groups like “Gays Against Groomers,” which insist that everyone “leave the kids alone!” while also insisting that any child that does exhibit homosexual tendencies be celebrated, uplifted, and encouraged to adopt “gay” as their primary identity by the time they start experiencing sexual thoughts. While true that many “detrans” gay guys I’ve met come from families which have, to some extent, punished them for being a little fruity, I don’t believe that the solution lies in publicly celebrating homosexuality as a vaunted new social tradition, especially considering the widespread celebration of homosexuality came right before the explosion in trans identification.
5. Radical Feminists
Not much to say here that I haven’t said before in prior essays, in particular "Tumbling into Trans Activism." Radical feminists were on the cutting edge of trans acceptance through their ruthless deconstruction of biological sex differences into “socially-constructed” nonsense, claiming that virtually every observable sex difference comes from societal relations, rather than the biological realities which undergird those societal relations. While it’s also true that certain radical feminists from back in the day levied extensive critiques at the acceptance of transsexuals into women’s spaces, it’s also true that the first women’s spaces to really allow transsexuals unfettered access to women were radical feminists and in particular, lesbians.
Most of the famous radical feminist canon, be it Beauvoir, Dworkin, or Butler (a controversial addition, I know, but ultimately still relevant to radical feminism) have penned many a piece in favor of transsexualism or at the very least, of blurring the lines between the sexes in an anti-biological, pro-social constructionist fashion. Modern radical feminists which take issue with transsexualism obscure these older writings and elevate other ones which offer only half-baked critiques of the most egregious excesses (again the old motte-and-bailey motif comes up).
The biggest problem with the radical feminists as a political bloc is the fact that they are perpetual leftists. As a bloc, they will never vote in large numbers for anything other than a left-wing candidate who encourages abortion up to the point of birth, on-demand birth control for every menstruating female regardless of age, and diversity quotas for women in fields women simply do not excel at or are uninterested in. The Right may field candidates willing to soften on some of these positions some of the time, but regardless, when push comes to shove, they will not vote for conservative candidates willing to put a serious stop to trans if it means sacrificing any of those other policies. This is an especially pointed critique given that most Republican candidates at the federal level don’t really do much to touch those policies despite the electoral saber-rattling about them. Indeed, feminists have the same mindset as the homosexual activists, in that they claim more conservative policies are going to exacerbate the trans issue due to sexual repression, as if the permanent sexual revolution has done anything but advance it. It’s a constant shifting of the goalposts, the transformation of what used to be considered liberal extremism becoming either fond American traditions held sacrosanct by both sides (such as MLK, who was incredibly unpopular around the country while alive) or reactionary extremism to be entirely disavowed (such as Margaret Sanger, albeit for competing reasons; feminists tend to hate her eugenics record, while right-wingers tend to emphasize her role in abortion policy).
Lastly, they are also the demographic most likely to peddle in the detransitioner trauma porn, and they have the least concern for the young boys who are caught in this trap, only reacting in disgust as if males who transition are always doing it just to prey on women, and cannot be victims of powers greater than them. The bulk of them only care when the girls get hurt, which is a problem because it’s not just girls getting hurt. They don’t want any male leadership on the trans issue even though they’ve managed to accomplish close to nothing on their own, which is why they’re desperately preying on recently-converted detransitioners to be their mouthpieces in hopes that one of them will be their Dworkinite Messiah. Indeed, some of the craziest ones have even insinuated that they take no issue with the castration and feminization of men and boys. They get off on it, it’s a massive power trip and for some, a sexual fantasy not dissimilar to those of the majority female medical and therapeutic staff facilitating these experiments (a fact they also conceal by claiming they are “handmaidens” handpicked by the patriarchy, and have no agency of their own).
However, this is only one cohort; there are many and they often overlap as often as they come to blows. Regardless, their views on this as a bloc are not coherent and they are more concerned with other matters. Trans is just another battlefield for them, and they cynically use self-avowed detransitioners as props and mouthpieces.
This is already a lengthy piece and I’ve already tread this territory so I will leave this section as it is. If you want to read more about my critique of radical feminists in nominally “anti-trans” politics, I refer you to the half of my Substack pieces which cover it.
6. Transsexuals
Little to be said about this, but what little there is to be said should carry greater weight than almost anything else mentioned. There is a reason I titled the section on homosexuals “Homosexual Activists,” whereas this section omits the second word. The reason being? You can be a person who engages in homosexual acts without advocating the normalization and acceptance of homosexuality. On the other hand, you cannot trust any trans-identified individual to be meaningfully opposed to the transgender political project because in order for them to exist in any large numbers at all, they need extensive institutional backing at the expense of ordinary people.
By the very nature of their disorder, they are untrustworthy, they are manipulative, and they are emotional terrorists. They live in a different reality than everyone else. They will absolutely take advantage of people’s horrors towards the excesses while gleefully pushing forward the premises. They may agitate against transgenders in sports, they may take umbrage with child transitions, they may go so far as to suggest more screening in fielding potential medicalization candidates — but they will never shut off the faucet of hormones and surgeries and civil rights legislation favoring them over ordinary people completely. Detransitioners who remain friendly with these agitators are open to being manipulated by them. “It wasn’t right for me, but it was right for them,” is the common refrain among those who haven’t outgrown their attachment to the state-backed cult.
Their personal emotional goal in being the “based” transsexual is to justify to themselves their transition, to state plainly to everyone else that “it was right for them,” and that it would be wrong to curtail these procedures completely, and to make more extreme trans activists seem crazy by comparison (which isn’t hard to do; only problem is that they’re still crazy attention-seeking demons themselves). Their political goals, informed by their bottomless need for constant validation and inability to receive substantive criticism, are to curb those excesses which appear to threaten the premises which allow them to live out their cross-dressing fetish. They want to stop all of those horrible things we hear about only so that some of those horrible things continue to occur under people’s radar, so they can maintain their place as a celebrated identity group “suffering” from “social marginalization,” rather than be viewed as activists who quietly seek to create new cripples like them.
They will never not play the victim, they will never not demand far more than is reasonable while calling their own positions “reasonable” and “nuanced,” they will never not blackmail their friends into becoming political supplicants because that is their only contemporary role. It is the only lens they can see themselves through and they demand that you see them that way as well, regardless of their stated aversion to the extremes of the so-called “gender-goblins” they use as a foil. The only actual foil to the gender-goblins is someone who has stayed far away from this scene their whole lives and who, in spite of the pervasive propaganda, knows what these things are and is not afraid to say it. A “based” or “nuanced” transsexual is just another flavor of gender-goblin, and someone who’s detransitioned is so close to the issue one might as well consider them this as well. I don’t consider myself the ideal foil given I fell for the hype too; standards have to be strict on this if anything is to change.
7. The Right-Wing Cohort
Right-wingers are of three minds with regard to detransitioners. On the one hand, play stupid games, win stupid prizes; i.e., if you didn’t want your dick cut off, why did you cut off your dick? Harsh but pretty fair. On another, there is more sympathy but also quite a bit of fear. Losing one’s kids as a result of not affirming their gender identity is suddenly a very real fear. A hysterical reaction to these developments is actually not unreasonable. On the other hand, there are those who tend to (say it with me now) critique the excesses and reify the premises. This third group can and does emerge from either of the two prior camps, which in turn produces a fourth: Those who are against all things trans.
The cohort of Right-wing detransitioners is relatively small but they do exist. This was the direction I was taking before I decided that the Right is just as full of shit as the Left. In general they gravitate towards a traditionalist understanding of relations between sexes because they are over-correcting on what they were doing before, but it’s “traditionalist” in the same way that a pornographic picture of a white woman in a sundress pouring milk all over her breasts is “traditionalist.” It’s live-action roleplay; LARP. It’s an emotional, media-driven overcorrection signaling a fondness for a simpler time with clear boundaries and roles, even though that simpler time is gone and in any case led to the times we live in today.
There is no RETVRNing, nor is there any kind of megamodernist fascism on the rise to sweep away all the filth of liberal democracy. The people who wrap themselves in these extremist ideologies (foreign and often inimical to the US, mind you) are no different from the Tumblr communists who nostalgically jerk off to Soviet propaganda posters while sobbing about what could have been. They have all the same political instincts of an Ariana Grande stan, only they stan Pinochet or Peron or Hitler. This isn’t meant to make them seem dangerous, just sad. They’re fans of political leaders whose movements ultimately failed just like the modern-day Maoist. In the end, they’re all going to vote for a Republican anyway, whether it’s Trump, DeSantis, Chris Christie, or Blaire White. They’re party activists first, ideological extremists second. Indeed, the latter flows from their being the former, it doesn’t go in the other direction. And the funny thing is? They have their own pet trannies in the form of “The Dolls,” a set of transsexuals who launder Right-wing critique of transgenderism through a pro-trans filter. A motte-and-bailey tactic for this media sphere, where the motte is concentration camps for “woke” liberals and the bailey is interviewing transsexuals about their alleged role in “high art.”
8. Politics In Summa
This coalition is no different from the coalition which pushed transition in the first place. The only meaningful addition is the existence of trans people who have sinced renounced their transition. This is hardly a substantive change with regard to their collective and individual material interests. It provides a new battleground, a new platform upon which to fight the same battles they had fought ten years ago.
Detransitioners and the cohorts which are intrigued by them belong to the Right of the Democrats and the Left of the Republicans. Most Right-wingers aren’t that Right-wing, and neither are most Left-wingers that Left-wing. It’s the activists that pretend to be this or that, using their fandom’s rhetoric to push whatever policies are salient at the time. This is why you do see transsexuals across the whole Right and growing (but neutered) anti-LGBT sentiment from the moderate Left. It may not be anti-LGBT sentiment as such, but a growing weariness of having to defend these concepts and sacred cows which provide little benefit to most people. It’s not that the Left is becoming bigoted against the minorities they depend on for political supremacy; they’re just starting not to care as much about the gays as the Right does.
I believe this development to be downstream of political goings-on behind closed doors. I’m of the belief that media is solely meant to manipulate, not to inform; if the narrative is shifting, and if the coalitions are shifting, it’s not an organic shift, it’s one guided by (largely social) media. The only thing that would be organic would be something that doesn’t make it online or to broadcast, but somehow touches millions. Most people don’t really have the political consciousness or awareness to have firm, unassailable beliefs that they are willing to die or kill for. Beliefs on their own don’t count for much of anything in the world of politics. Conditions do, strategy does, but ideology is only really useful as part of a strategy to navigate certain conditions. It’s not an end in itself, and no one treats it like one except slaves who love their chains. Those who treat it like the tool that it is are few and far between; even fewer actually get to use it.
Detransitioners don’t create a new paradigm around transgenderism, they just add a layer of complexity each faction has to contend with. There is already so much cognitive dissonance involved in supporting transgenderism as a concept that detrans cannot and will not be what pops that particular bubble for everyone. And even if it were, it doesn’t stop people from continuing to support the same policies as before, albeit with a mild degree of caution.
VI. Conclusion
This is as comprehensive as I can make my critique of detransition. It runs the entire gamut. Ultimately, it really is kind of a useless concept. Useful maybe for those who need to find camaraderie among peers who’ve experienced something similar, in the same way hurricane victims might need to mourn and grieve among hurricane victims. Otherwise, it’s nothing. On a personal level, it obscures the more important actions needed in order to recover, on an institutional level it encourages the aggregation of digital misery. Politically, they’re just a new addition to a coalition they’ve always belonged to but is changing its story to remain relevant to party power brokers. Not a thing has changed. The “detrans moment” as such is already over anyway. That word is no longer on anyone’s lips except the few groups who popularized it and the people who have Cool Trans Friends(TM).
What will make real political headway on the Trans Question, headway which doesn’t just let it creep us along towards pedophile acceptance, gene editing in artificial wombs, and transhumanist brain implants? I have no idea. That’s not my bag. The only real solution is to crush them, erase them from public life, and salt the (legal) world where they stood, but there is no organization or leadership to channel that. Whatever that coalition could be, it would have to have more force behind it than BlackRock’s $10 trillion. Good luck.
Very interesting as always. I suppose that I have a tendency to see what I already believe in everything but it seems to me that the point is that those who subsume their identity in to some group, in exchange for whatever advantages, always wind up pushing us in the same direction, whether they call what they are doing Left or Right, Progressive or Conservative.
Fundamentally, I think that you are a less superficial thinker than many others who are, at least apparently, in similar circumstances to yours and you can't help but be critical of their lack of understanding of root causes. 'The Right' has put a lot of hope into detrans on the theory that having seen this particular evil that they will generalize in a great way and catalyze some new renaissance of Traditionalism. But we need to ask if a fellow that has to chop his dick off to realise that having a dick is a good thing is really likely to be a thought leader. But modern society, on both sides, continues to be unable to realise that theoretical knowledge and practical knowledge are not at all directly related.
Society is on a downward path and the thing about a downward path is that whether you walk well or you stumble you keep going down. You can't fall up a hill. Unless some new life and new direction comes to society the only difference between Left and Right will remain: do you want an easy smooth walk to Hell(Progressivism) or do you want to do the whole thing rolling and smashing your head(Conservatism)? Which is better? Which gets you deeper faster? Which leaves you in better shape for the climb back up, assuming we ever turn around? I dunno but neither side knows how or really wants to turn around. So, while society continues to fall, we as individuals can go another way so long as we do not bury the self in the crowd and are willing to do that hardest of things, Repent.
Wow, loved it, your thinking about the issues is full of subtlety.
I was particularly intrigued by section 4. I’d like to read more about the topics you touch on there, perhaps you could find more to say? I think the whole subject of how homosexuality came to occupy the sociopolitical space it does now is very interesting.
I’m in my fifties and have always been against the stigma attached to homosexuality. I thought the issue had been very much resolved towards the start of the 90s when the attitude was to live and let live and whatever happens between consenting adults is nobody’s business. But for the last ten years or more I have been surprised to see the topic of ‘gay rights’ growing more heads than the mythological Hydra to the point of being a permanent news fixture. From sympathy, to incomprehension, all the way to confused revulsion. I don’t know what is happening but I’m starting to sense dangers I’d never considered before. I can’t really see the justification for instance for a whole Pride month. What the hell, how we ever pushed mothers, fathers or, say bus drivers like that (even in primary schools too!)?
Also, I’d never questioned homosexuality per se but you make some very convincing points about the regulation of sexuality which go some way to explain the dislike for the prominent publicity homosexuality receives nowadays (even in populations that have accepted it in the private realm).
About your last question, what will make real political headway on the Trans Question, I have an idea that may be controversial. I think the present confrontation between Russia and the west (at a deeper level between the global south lead by China/Russia and the Anglo Saxon-led west) is going to end up with them winning and, as a corollary, a dramatic shifting of values in the west. Putin has mentioned LGBT+ a few times, characterising it as a carrier movement of disruptive imperialist influences, one more propaganda weapon against countries that don’t tie the western line.
The trans question (and a few other questions) is not going to be solved intra-nationally, our culture has destroyed the tools necessary to change direction, we are powerless to stop this train. But stop it will, only not by us.
And what might happen is that when our elites call on us for a last ditch defence of ‘western values’ more people than we expect might just shrug their shoulders. The trans question is part of a package of end of empire morbidities. I believe you talked about that when you wrote about the eunuchs of antiquity. Cheers.