Shortly before I decided to detransition, I had a conversation with a trans friend about the Gender Unicorn. I was frustrated by it. I said, it doesn't make any sense! It doesn't actually represent what being trans is about at all! In some ways, the ideas it represents run completely counter to the actual goals of the trans movement!
My friend's response was that it didn't matter; it was better than the binary concept of gender believed by mainstream society. The Gender Unicorn didn't have to make sense, it just had to be simple and easy to spread. It's not an accurate representation of the ideology behind the transgender rights movement because it was never meant to be.
It's a recruiting tool.
The Lies of Gender Ideology
According to the Gender Unicorn, everyone has a gender identity: an internal gender separate from their sex. Like sex, it can be male or female. It can also be things other than male or female. In fact, there’s no limit to what a gender can be! Some people are “non-binary”, meaning their gender identity is neither male nor female. Gender identity doesn’t correspond to anything physical in the body or brain. It can’t be observed from the outside, but is known to the person experiencing it. A person can know their gender identity at any age, and can never be wrong about it—except when they are. Gender identity has no bearing on a person's personality, behavior, or mannerisms—except when it does.
When one’s gender identity doesn’t match one’s biological sex, this causes a condition known as gender dysphoria. Gender dysphoria has no cure, but nevertheless should be treated via gender transition. Gender transition involves interfering with a trans person’s endocrine system to cause them to develop secondary sex characteristics of the opposite sex and surgery to remove or alter unwanted sex characteristics. This is called medical transition. Medical transition changes a person’s sex, not their gender—except that it doesn’t change their sex, because one’s sex is determined by their gender identity. A male whose gender identity is female actually has a female body, and his—sorry, “her”—penis is a female sex organ. Despite this, “she” may want to get surgery to make “her” penis into a non-functional caricature of a vagina. Such an act should be celebrated.
Just as important as medical transition is social transition. When someone tells you they’re trans, you need to affirm them. You need to allow them to access facilities and opportunities intended for the opposite sex. You need to treat them, in every circumstance, as if they are the opposite sex—even when it comes to sex and medical treatment. You need to call them by whatever name they choose. You need to use their preferred pronouns. Most importantly, you need to believe. You need to look at someone who’s obviously male and believe, deep down in your heart, that he’s actually a woman.
If you don't understand this ideology—if you think it's absurd and incoherent—that's because it makes no sense. But the thing is, it doesn't have to. It’s a lie. Some trans rights activists—often new recruits—believe it whole-heartedly. Others sort of believe it, or have developed complicated justifications to make it make sense (maybe they weren’t born trans, but became trans due to being “socialized as the wrong gender”). Some recognize its absurdity, but see it as useful for bringing more people into the movement. A few don’t like it at all. But all of them benefit from it.
The seeming contradictions of gender ideology make perfect sense when you understand how they serve the interests of the movement.
For example, consider gender expression. Gender expression encompasses both your behavior and the clothes you wear. It's completely disconnected from your gender identity—except when it's not. Sometimes, being a guy who wears dresses or a girl with short hair says nothing about your gender identity. Other times it's indicative of repressed knowledge of your gender identity. The purpose of this seeming contradiction is to bring people into the movement and keep them in it. If you're a "cis person" who doesn't meet the stereotypes of your gender, well, you're probably trans. But if you're a trans person who doesn't meet the stereotypes of your chosen gender—say, a female "trans man" who likes dresses and flowers, or a male "trans woman" who loves video games—then that doesn't suggest anything at all about your gender identity. The rules are inconsistently applied to serve specific purposes.
Likewise, every trans person knows their gender identity, and this cannot be questioned. "Trans kids know who they are" is a popular rallying cry among proponents of childhood social transition. However, sometimes trans kids don't know who they are. Sometimes, they think they're "cis". If a male child thinks he’s a boy, he should question his gender, because he might actually be a girl. If a male child thinks he’s a girl, though, that belief can’t be challenged under any circumstances.
Social transition is the most insidious trick of all. It weaponizes your empathy to force you to act according to the beliefs of the trans movement and tries to guilt-trip you into adopting those beliefs. If you don’t go along with someone’s transition without question, you’re a transphobe. You’re doing harm to them. This expectation can easily establish a stranglehold over a community, and then force compliance by threatening expulsion for anyone who doesn’t act properly and adopt the right beliefs. And once you’ve taken on one belief which obviously doesn’t reflect reality—say, “trans women are women”—it becomes much easier to push you into believing even more extreme falsehoods.
So, if gender identity is fake, what are the real beliefs foundational to the trans movement? Where did they come from? What do members of the movement talk about behind closed doors?
Tumblr Leftism
When I was a teenage transsexual, I considered myself a radical feminist. Not a TERF; us radical feminist transsexuals didn't think TERFs were true radical feminists like we were. After all, a feminist fights for all women. TERFs only fought for cis women. They weren't real feminists; they were bigots hiding behind the cloak of radical feminism to spew their hate.
So, what did radical feminism mean to me? I hadn't actually read any works by radical feminist thinkers, only excerpts from writings by feminists like Andrea Dworkin, Judith Butler, and Julie Bindel, which were posted without context on Tumblr by other trans-inclusive radical feminists. Some of those feminists were trans themselves; some were not. They were the thought leaders. They constructed an ideology collaboratively, using social media as their medium. Not all of them agreed with each other, but a spiderweb of mutual follows connected them, and what one wrote on any one day would influence what a dozen others wrote the next day. When I was fifteen years old, I adopted a kaleidoscopic, schizophrenic ideology patched together from hundreds of individual posts talking about feminism, disability, gender identity, queerness, race, capitalism, and leftism. I didn't have the context for any of it, and neither did any of the other teenage kids on Tumblr at the time–of which there were many. I knew a few of them well. I called the police to one's house during a suicide attempt. We took this stuff in and internalized it. We believed it.
An interesting point of this belief system is social constructionism. Social constructionism suggests that gender is made up: a tool used by the patriarchy to oppress women and control men. If it weren’t for the patriarchy, all divisions between men and women would disappear. We would all be equal. Radical transsexuals will admit, to trusted cult members, that they believe gender is socially constructed. They'll admit that they weren't born trans, but chose to become trans.
So… why would anyone choose to transition? Why do individual trans people care so much about receiving treatment, and why do members of the movement spend so much time facilitating the transition of others? When a trans person questions the narrative, or wants to gain a deeper understanding, what do they discover?
Metaphysics of Marginalization
Medical transition is ritual purification.
The world painted by Tumblr's radical queer, feminist, transsexual theorists was one that has since become familiar to many people. You might know it as Wokeism, DEI, Successor Ideology, or Critical Theory. It has many tenets, but to massively oversimplify, it applies a pseudo-Marxist analysis to pretty much every social issue: men oppress women, whites oppress People of Color, the abled oppress the disabled, and so on. Through the magic of Intersectionality, these class antagonisms coalesce into one great struggle: the oppression of the Marginalized by White Supremacist Capitalist Cis-Hetero-Patriarchy (the Enemy). The world is wicked, and it is that way because it was made wicked by the Enemy.
One has to understand the nature of the world’s evil before one can repair it. The first step in obtaining that knowledge is realizing that our bodies are not us, but things which we're trapped inside of. We're not humans; we're ghosts haunting rotting corpses. To stop the Enemy, trans people need to make us all understand that our true selves don’t exist in our corrupted material forms. This is what gender identity actually means: We are not our bodies.
Virtuous souls have been unjustly trapped in profane flesh. The most virtuous are those who suffer most from their embodiment: women, “queer” people, the disabled, those lower in the hierarchy of the racial caste system described by critical race theorists like Robin DiAngelo and Ibram X. Kendi. These are the Marginalized. The Marginalized are the chosen people. They are chosen because they suffer. If you aren’t Marginalized, you can become Marginalized by deciding to transition. If you’re already Marginalized, you can become even more virtuous through transition, because Marginalized identities stack. A Woman of Color is more virtuous than a white woman, and a Trans Woman of Color is more virtuous yet. Trans actually carries more weight than some other forms of Marginalization; a woman transitioning to become a trans “man” or a gay person becoming a “straight” trans person are increasing their net Marginalization despite giving up Marginalized identities.
If those who are born Black or disabled are the chosen, trans people are the converts who have voluntarily accepted Marginalization. They choose to suffer more from their involuntary embodiment. Because of this, they become virtuous. They are saved.
To the trans movement, every transitioner increases the amount of virtue in the world and represents a blow struck against the Enemy. They’re another soul rescued from the clutches of evil. Not every member of the movement understands this on an intellectual level, but they know in their gut it’s all in service of the greater good and that convincing as many people as possible to transition is a moral imperative. If that means grooming teens online, then they'll groom teens online. If that means encouraging people to indulge in destructive fetishes, they'll encourage people to indulge in destructive fetishes. If that means indoctrinating kids in school while lying to their parents, they’ll do that. If that means convincing gay people they're heterosexuals trapped in the wrong body, they'll do that too. If that means prescribing puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and performing surgery…
The world created by the Enemy is irredeemably wicked. For trans people to simply integrate into society would be to surrender to the Enemy. White Supremacist Capitalist Cis-Hetero-Patriarchy can’t be bargained with or reformed. It can only be destroyed: torn down utterly, uprooted and burned, and replaced with Feminist Anti-Racist Fully-Automated Luxury Communism.
The dream of the trans movement is of a world where no one has to do anything they don't want, where no one is forced to work, where everyone can indulge their every desire without fear or shame, where all distinctions between people have been abolished and we're all completely equal. In a word: Utopia.
If human biology gets in the way of that, then human biology must be fixed. If human nature gets in the way of that, then human nature must be fixed. Until Utopia is achieved, the movement hasn't done its work. If you stand in the way of Utopia, then you've got to be fixed as well, by any means necessary.
They need you to believe that the world is wicked and must be destroyed. They need you to believe that we're floating spirits trapped in dead flesh. They need you to believe that the fundamental facts of reality can be changed, if only we believe hard enough and are willing to do what must be done.
They need you to believe that trans women are women.
I have never seen a science fiction movie as weird as the current society I am living in.
Wow, really shows why "no debate" was an early strategy.