Ben Appel in spiked on The New Homophobia:

In 2017, at the age of 33, I enrolled at Columbia University, New York to complete my undergraduate degree. There, I was shocked to discover how gay activism had evolved since marriage equality became the law of the land. The focus was now entirely on personal pronouns and on being ‘queer’. My classmates labelled me ‘cis’, short for cisgender. I didn’t even know what it meant. All I knew was that they called me ‘cis’ in the same cadence that the seventh graders had called me ‘fag’.

Oh but that can’t be right. Cis is to trans as straight is to gay, isn’t it? No, it isn’t, but we’re supposed to pretend it is.

Soon, I learned about nonbinary identities, and that some people – many people – were literally arguing that sex, not gender, was a social construct. I met people who evangelised a denomination of transgenderism that I had never heard of, one that included people who had never been gender dysphoric and who had no desire to medically transition. I met straight people whose ‘trans / nonbinary’ identities seemed to be defined by their haircuts, outfits and inchoate politics. I met straight women with Grindr accounts, and listened to them complain about the ‘transphobic’ gay men who didn’t want to have sex with women.

All around me, it seemed, straight people were spontaneously identifying into my community and then policing our behaviours and customs. I began to think that this broadening of the ‘trans’ and ‘queer’ umbrella was giving a hell of a lot of people a free pass to express their homophobia.

And their misogyny too. It’s turning out to be quite a gift.

I wondered how different these so-called trans kids were from the little boy I had been. Obviously, I grew up to be a gay man and not a transwoman. But how could gender clinicians tell the difference between a young boy expressing his homosexuality through gender nonconformity, and someone ‘born in the wrong body’? I decided to dig deeper into the real history of medical transition.

What I learned validated all of my worst fears. I learned that for decades after their invention, synthetic ‘sex hormones’ were used by doctors and scientists who sought to ‘cure’ homosexuality, and by law enforcement to chemically castrate men convicted of committing homosexual acts.

…

I began to fear we had reached a point of no return a couple of years ago, during a conversation I had with a supposedly ‘progressive’ friend. I told her that, if I had been a young boy now, I likely would have been prescribed puberty blockers and gone on to medically transition. ‘And you don’t think you would’ve been happy as a transwoman?’, she asked me. Her question left me speechless. I couldn’t find the words to state the obvious: that I am a gay man, not a transwoman; that statistics tell me my medical transition may not have been successful; and that I would suffer severe medical complications. In any case, if I had transitioned, I wouldn’t be living an authentic life. After all, isn’t that what this is supposed to be about? Living authentically?

Well…yes, but…not that kind of authentically. The other kind. The kind based on fantasy and cosplay.

He has a book in the works. I want to read it.

Ben Appel is a writer based in New York. His forthcoming memoir, Cis White Gay: The Making of a Gender Heretic, will be published by Post Hill Press.

Cis white woman gender heretic sends high five.