Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on This miasmic swamp of delusional bullshit.

We keep using the word “trans” as if it meant one thing, when the differences between a sensitive, “girly” boy who likes dolls and dresses (previously likely to grow up gay), a teenage girl with no prior history of gender dysphoria who comes to see herself as a “boy” (or “non-binary”, “queer” etc.) through social contagion from friends and online influencers, and a porn-obsessed straight man who gets turned on by the idea of being his own jerk-off fantasy couldn’t be more glaring. We also keep talking about ”gender dysphoria” as a single, one-size-fits-all diagnosis with a single cause (being born in the wrong body) and a single cure (medically ”correcting” the body), when, in fact, different people seek to escape their sex for very different reasons. If anything “gender dysphoria” is a symptom rather than a disease: Something to be explained rather than an explanation. The following is my modest attempt at identifying the main ingredients of the gender cocktail as I currently understand them.

1. The Social Contagion Aspect

Despite attempts to appropriate non-Western concepts of third genders [1] in support of gender ideology, the modern gender identity movement is very much a recent Western cultural phenomenon. Many have pointed out the parallels between the current explosion in trans identification among teenagers and previous mental health fads like repressed memories, multiple personality disorder, eating disorders, various kinds of self-harm (e.g. cutting) etc. These trends all spread throughout the population over time through social contagion, and in every case teenage girls were vastly over-represented among the afflicted.

The physical and hormonal changes associated with puberty can be distressing enough in themselves, especially for girls, and are often accompanied by additional burdens like body-shame, teasing, unwanted male attention etc. In every age vulnerable girls look to their social circle (and, more recently, the internet) for clues to make sense of their distress, and every age has its own specific answer to offer. In one place at one time it might have been repressed trauma caused by forgotten sexual abuse in childhood. In another place at another time girls might be taught to fixate on their weight as the source of their misery. Today, all over the Western world, the standard explanation, eagerly pushed by activists (#2) as well as friends, teachers, therapists, online influencers, children’s books, the mainstream media, public institutions etc. is “you’re born in the wrong body and need to be fixed”.

2. The Social Justice aspect

Of course the trans craze has not arisen in a vacuum, but can only be properly understood in the light of wider intellectual and ideological trends whether you prefer to call it “Critical Social Justice” ideology, “wokeism”, “applied postmodernism”, “identity politics”, “the identity synthesis”, or something else entirely. This movement – which traces its ideological roots back to the French postmodernists of the 1960s and 70s, but has mutated into its current form in elite American colleges and universities – understands society in terms of zero-sum power struggles between privileged (oppressors) and marginalized (oppressed) identity groups (races, genders, sexual orientations etc.). According to the prevailing theory of intersectionality your place in the power hierarchy is entirely determined by the various identity categories you happen to fall into. If your intersecting identities put you in the ”privileged” box, you are considered an oppressor by virtue of existing (regardless of your actions, and regardless of the actual circumstances of your life), which means everybody else has a permanent blank check to attack you in the name of ”punching up”, and you don’t have a right to stand up for yourself.

While Critical Race Theory (the lens through which matters of race and ethnicity are analyzed) does not allow you to “identify out of” your whiteness (and hence your responsibility for systemic racism), Queer Theory (the lens through which matters of gender and sexual orientation are analyzed) does allow you to identify out of your “gender” which has, for all intents and purposes, replaced biological sex as a category in woke orthodoxy. Hence, if you’re a straight, white, able-bodied (etc.) kid, pretty much your only way to earn any “oppression points”, and avoid ending up as a permanent punching bag, is to adopt a marginalized gender identity or some kind of mental health diagnosis (another “identity” that has shot through the roof!) or both.

3. The Homosexual Link

Perhaps the saddest irony of the current crusade to medically “correct” young people’s bodies with puberty-blockers, hormone therapy, surgery etc. is that a disproportionately large percentage of them would otherwise almost certainly grow up as gay. Same-sex attracted individuals were often highly gender-nonconforming as children. Especially in a culture in which stereotypically “feminine” or “girly” behavior in boys is still frequently frowned upon [2], it is easy to understand how a sensitive, “proto-gay” boy might come to think he was “meant” to be a girl. But even for girls the pressure to be stereotypically “feminine” seems to have gotten worse rather than better in recent decades, so it’s hardly surprising that many of the more “tomboyish” girls, previously likely to grow up as butch lesbians, come to the conclusion that it would be easier to live as a boy.

Of course it doesn’t help that practically every organization that used to fight for the rights and interests of same-sex attracted people has turned 180° (#2) and no longer even recognizes biological sex – let alone “same-sex attraction” – as a thing. Only “same gender attraction” is still recognized. According to this redefinition, e.g. a “lesbian” is a person of any sex who identifies as a “woman” while being attracted to other people (once again, of any sex) who identify as “women”. To be exclusively attracted to one’s own biological sex (i.e. exactly what it used to mean to be “gay” or “lesbian”) is now actively condemned as bigotry [3], all in the name of “LGBTQ+” rights and interests!

4. The Autism Link

Another group that is greatly over-represented among the young people currently lining up for “gender-affirming” medical treatment are kids on the autism spectrum. These kids often struggle with social awkwardness as well as feelings of being different and not fitting in with their peers, which, in the current climate, can only too easily be reinterpreted as symptoms of gender dysphoria (#1). People on the autism spectrum also tend to gravitate toward rigid, black and white thinking (girls are into dolls and pink dresses, boys are into cars and blue jeans etc.) and are therefore especially vulnerable to the idea that not fitting the prevailing gender stereotypes is a sure sign of being born in the wrong body.

5. The Sexual Abuse Link

A disproportionally large percentage of the young people seeking out “gender-affirming care” have a history of sexual abuse. It’s easy to see how victims of such abuse can come to see their bodies as forever “tainted” by the experience, which must make the idea of “starting over” in a new body (even as a new person!) seem only too appealing. An abused girl may come to see her femaleness as the source of her victimization. From there it’s a just short step to wanting to escape femaleness altogether. Male victims, on the other hand, may see their abuse at the hands of another male as incompatible with “masculinity”. There are also male victims who decide they have to be girls, because the idea of belonging to the same sex as their abuser is just too intolerable.

6. The Porn Link

Even from an early age children can hardly avoid being exposed to vast amounts of increasingly violent and misogynistic online pornography [4] in which women are being choked, slapped, spat in the face etc. for the gratification of men [5]. A certain kind (#7) of trans-identified males (whom the children are taught never to question, criticize, or disagree with for any reason – only a hateful, intolerant bigot could possibly do such a thing, remember!) frequently portray being used as an object for the gratification of men as an inherent part of what it means to be a “woman”. E.g. trans-identified “Andrea” Long Chu famously summed up “femaleness” distilled to “its barest essentials” as “an open mouth, an expectant asshole, blank, blank eyes”. No wonder many girls decide that “if that’s what it means to be a woman, then count me out!”. Come to think of it, if treating women like that is part of what it means to be a “man”, you can probably count a lot of males (myself included!) out as well (#9).

Other males get stuck in an escalating spiral in which they require increasingly extreme stimuli to “get off”. To many trans identified males the road to castration began with an obsession with so-called “sissy-porn” [6] in which males are supposedly “emasculated” and turned into women through endless violence and humiliation.

7. The Autogynephila Link

To most well-meaning liberals and lefties, the word “trans” probably conjures up images of sensitive, “girly”, gay males, as well as “tomboyish”, “hyper-butch”, lesbian females (#3) who only want to live and let live. Who could possibly be so heartless and cruel as to deny these non-threatening, severely distressed young people some special dispensations, even if means making some concessions we probably wouldn’t have made otherwise (being a “man” or a “woman” is about “gender” rather than sex, the only way to determine a person’s “gender” is self-identification etc.)?

There is a problem, however: If you look at many of the loudest trans-identified males out there, they are neither same-sex attracted, nor particularly “effeminate” at all. Quite the contrary, in fact: The last thing these guys can be accused of is displaying too little toxic masculinity, too little aggression, not enough raging entitlement, insufficient need for dominance, or, for that matter, being too nurturing, caring, sensitive, empathetic, selfless etc. As Helen Joyce has pointed out, you cannot truly understand how we ended up in the current mess without acknowledging that there are some extremely motivated and entitled men out there who will stop at nothing to get what they want and destroy anyone who gets in their way. Their goal is unrestricted access to female-only spaces (which, of course, makes them no longer “female only”), the way to get there is self-id (i.e. saying you’re a woman obligates everybody else to treat you, and even think of you, as such for all purposes), and the Trojan horse for smuggling in self-id is to reframe it in terms of compassion towards severely distressed, gender-nonconforming children and teenagers. The thousands of young people currently subjected to experimental treatments are collateral damage.

Autogynephilia (meaning “love of oneself as a woman”) is a male fetish or paraphilia [7], more or less synonymous with what used to be known as “transvestism” or “erotic cross-dressing”. Autogynephiles are straight, often quite stereotypically masculine, men who get turned on by the idea of being their own porn-inspired (#6) jerk-off fantasies. So these are the guys who tend to identify as “lesbians” and accuse real lesbians of bigotry for not being interested in their “lady-cock” [8]. They are also behind nearly all attempts by trans-identified males to force themselves into female only spaces, and the narcissistic rage when women’s boundaries get in their way may very well be the single greatest contributor to the frequently cited “toxicity” of the debate around trans issues.

8. The Wolf in Trans Clothing

The standard response whenever gender-critical feminists bring up the safety issues of allowing biological males to self-identify into female-only spaces is “so you’re saying all trans women are rapists?”. Well, no. The point is not that all trans-identified males are rapists, but that they are precisely males, and as such they are neither more nor less likely to be rapists (or voyeurs, flashers, gropers etc. [9]) than other males. While obviously not all males – trans-identified or not – commit sexual assault, enough of them do that it’s a problem. In the absence of telepathic powers you can’t tell in advance who poses a risk and who does not [10], which means women have a legitimate interest in keeping all males out of their most intimate and vulnerable spaces.

But even if we accept, for the sake of the argument, that no true Scotsman “trans woman” is a threat, how do we tell the “true trans women” from opportunistic predators who only pretend to be trans to get access to female only spaces if the only criterion for distinguishing “trans” from “non-trans” is self-id? Considering the lengths to which male predators throughout the ages have been prepared to go (e.g. studying for years to become Catholic priests) in order to get easy access to victims, the idea that no one who isn’t trans would ever claim to be for nefarious ends is frankly absurd. Besides, we’re also told that any trans-identified male who does commit sexual assault is not really trans but a “cis” man pretending to be trans to prey on women – precisely the thing that supposedly never happens! Despite this, the perpetrator must still be allowed to serve in a women’s prison, the victim must still be forced to refer to her rapist as a “woman” (who committed rape with “her penis”), and the rape must still enter the public record as committed by a “woman”. The level of Doublethink is truly staggering!

9. Escaping Toxic Masculinity

To be fair, it is almost certainly too simplistic to split all trans-identified males into effeminate gays and autogynephiles. It is probably also fair to say that not all males with autogynephilic tendencies are raging, entitled narcissists filled with bottomless contempt for women’s boundaries. At least to a first approximation, all trans-identified males who engage in predatory behavior seem to be autogynephiles, but that doesn’t mean that all, or even most, autogynephiles engage in predatory behavior.

Especially among younger straight males, the desire to distance oneself from precisely this kind of toxic masculinity and predatory behavior seems to be a powerful motive for identifying out of manhood.

[1] Such ideas are typically found in patriarchal cultures with strict gender roles and serve to protect the purity of manhood by defining effeminate (and probably gay) men out of the male sex. Despite claims to the contrary, these men are still not considered women, and none of these cultures fail to distinguish between biological males and biological females.

[2] Suzie Green, the former leader of the trans lobbying group Mermaids is on record talking about how her son’s gender-nonconforming behavior was making her husband uncomfortable, so they took him to Thailand to have him fixed. Others have referred to this practice of converting gay boys into “straight trans girls” (or vice versa) as “trans away the gay”.

[3] Planned Parenthood Toronto famously hosted a horrendously rapey workshop on the topic of “Overcoming the Cotton Ceiling: Breaking Down Sexual Barriers for Queer Trans Women”, the “Cotton Ceiling” being an obvious reference to women’s underwear, that bothersome obstacle to “Queer Trans Women” (i.e. males) getting into lesbian women’s vaginas.

[4] Typically beginning with more seemingly “innocent” (if somewhat “edgy”) material (cartoons, manga, anime etc.) and escalating over time as the social media algorithms keep suggesting increasingly extreme content.

[5] Children are also taught by woke activists (#2) that only a hateful, intolerant, bigot could possibly see this as anything but “progressive”, “liberatory”, “sex-positive” and even “empowering” to women.

[6] The World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), whose guidelines have been adopted as authoritative by health services all over the Western world, has held up “eunuch” as a legitimate gender identity. WPATHs website also used to include a link to a sissy porn site called “The Eunuch Archives” where much of the content was tagged “minor”.

[7] Despite frequent claims that the Autogynephilia diagnosis has been “discredited” or “debunked”, many of these men openly admit the fetishistic aspect of their orientation.

[8] The parallels to “incels” couldn’t be more obvious.

[9] Of course it’s not just a matter of physical “safety”. Women (or men for that matter!) also have a legitimate interest in privacy, dignity, comfort etc.

[10] Although contempt for women’s boundaries – which is precisely what you are demonstrating by forcing your presence on women who don’t want you in their spaces – is a major red flag in itself. Even the “gender-uncritical” feminists used to know this back in the days when so many of them kept eagerly citing the “Schrödinger’s Rapist” argument.