Originally a comment by Artymorty on Validate or else.
That’s Kathleen Stock’s insight: that people who call themselves trans are immersed in a dangerous fiction. Immersion in fiction can be a fine thing, and it can be a harmless thing, but if it gets hooked into a fad for “validating” the fiction as rock-solid truth…not so much.
What’s worse, is that the kids don’t know what kind of fiction they’re getting immersed into. The adults playing along with this fiction have their own agenda, and the kids aren’t being let in on it.
To many adult men, transgender is a special kind of immersive fiction, distinct from the nerdy hobby of live-action role-playing (LARPing).
Larpers get together in groups, and enact their roleplaying personas while they’re among the group, and revert to their real selves when interacting with people outside the group, or when they’re not actively “in session.”
But trans is more akin to kayfabe, a word that came into use at the turn of the last century as “professional” wrestling emerged among the travelling carnivals and sideshows that roved the American frontier. (Its etymology is unclear, but it’s probably derived from pig latin for “be fake.”) Kayfabe is like the reverse of Larping: you can let your guard down and be your true self only when you’re alone with your in-group peers; in the presence of outsiders you must always maintain the illusion that your roleplaying persona is real.
Wrestlers depended on elaborate fictional backstories and soap opera-like rivalries to generate excitement and draw crowds to thier (rigged, performative) bouts. Their livelihoods came to depend on keeping up the illusion that these personas were real; if word got out that they were faking it, the whole profession could collapse for loss of viewership.
“Pro” wrestling continues to this day, and the omertà of kayfabe was strictly maintained until as recently as 1989, when executives from the World Wrestling Federation, facing athletic regulation laws, testified to the New Jersey state senate and for the first time publicly admitted that wrestling superstars like Hulk Hogan and Andre the Giant were, in fact, paid entertainers and not professional athletes. Up until then, many of wrestlers’ own relatives were kept in the dark about how fake the whole thing was.
Fetishistic trans-identifying men are just like pro wrestlers in this regard. When they’re alone with each other they’re completely open about being fetishistic men, and they make and share pornographic videos with each other, etc. But in the presence of outsiders, ma’am’s the word. The lie must be maintained or the whole enterprise could collapse: no more unfettered access to women’s spaces and no more power to force everyone else to play along with their fantasy.
A clear example of a trans person’s private reality vs. public kayfabe is Lia Thomas’s social media: his public Instagram account is the usual guff about protecting trans kids and trans women are women blablabla… But he has a second, private Instagram account, which he uses to interact with his private circle of fellow fetishists and to allegedly share content about fetishistic transvestism and porn.
All of this is to say that these fetishists aren’t upfront that it’s all kayfabe to the children and their famililes they’re targeting, or with the institutions that are backing them. They’re not being let in on the scheme. This can and will be devastating to a lot of kids when they grow up and realize that most of the people leading the “trans community” are conspiring together in a lie to serve their personal, private sexual fantasies.
