I notice that the media coverage always highlights the fact that the authors of the report are anonymous. If those authors were disclosed, would detractors then view the report more favorably? Somehow, I think not; it's just an activist talking point, intended to discredit.
Thanks for this. Intent to discredit is rife in the gencrit world. I recently had an interview with Stella O'Malley which I refused permission to publish since the entire hour was focussed on attempting to discredit me, corner me into admitting to being AGP, and skilfully avoiding the points I had raised in correspondence such as critiquing Helen Joyce's book in which she made numerous false claims and representations. Look up the blogs on my page critical of her book. This is part 1, there is a part 2. https://claireraerandall.substack.com/p/review-of-helen-joyce-trans-when
I think you have misunderstood my comment. I think the discrediting will come from gender ideologues and trans rights activists who do not like the conclusions of this report.
But my comment about gencrits seeking to discredit actual transsexuals still stands. My conversation with O'Malley was like being faced with the Spanish Inquisition since she persistently attempted to push interpretations to which she tried to get me to confess but which I was resistant to, while avoiding going near my critiques of Helen Joyce.
It seems to mean nothing to some that I myself am critical of 'trans ideology'. I never needed it, it never even existed when I went through my process forty years ago. I think the hard line gender critics are blind to historical context in this.
The problem I see is that while I am highly critical of the ideology, such as 'self ID' I am treated as if I am one of those pushing early irreversible medical treatments when I go to great lengths in my book to warn against it due to the exponential rise of minor treatments by the Tavistock in the twenty teens, clearly contagion and ideology working overtime.
I can certainly relate to being misinterpreted, yes, and I am sorry that has happened to you. I know I don't like being told that because I think sex is real and that it matters in some social/legal situations that I hate trans people and want them to die. Hopefully, those of us who willing to assume others are acting in good faith can break through the noise created by those who insist that disagreement equals malice.
Thankyou. I just want people to consider the possibility that my own story is true. I was pleased that in my first podcast interview Alexander Wolfheze called my personal account 'authentic'. That meant a lot.
Thank you for this article. It raises important points that need to be made. I wonder what percentage of autogynephiles are gay, though. Being aroused by imagining yourself as a woman and being a same-sex attracted man seem at odds to me. This cohort of young men seems to have little in common with, say, the gay guys who go to Provincetown, who take care of their male bodies and who appear perfectly happy to have no women around. I wonder if some of these AGP young men are depressed and lonely straight guys with OCD and body issues. Not that they should lose their fertility and sexual function either!
I believe you’re correct—AGP young men are usually straight, and if you listen to their stories, they were often exposed to certain kinds of porn that caused them to fixate on themselves as women. BUT that doesn’t change the fact that young kids who are gay are being told they’ve been born in the wrong bodies. This pattern has a precedent in Islamic countries where homosexuality is punishable by death. Tehran was once the gender reassignment capital of the world, and may still be.
As a therapist myself my professional opinion is that a therapist should not tell their client what the solution to their problem is. Neither should they completely agree with the client. The purpose of a therapist is to help the client to understand their problem and come to the best possible resolution of it. Clearly 'therapists' who rush to tell children that they are 'trans' and hurry them onto puberty blockers are engaged in malpractice and should be barred from practising.
The last I saw, Iran was in second place, behind Thailand, the destination of choice for medical tourism, especially for sex change surgeries. It does stand out, however, for providing government subsidies for “affirming” treatments. What's holding it back from more vocal approval of its advanced public policy among more spiritually elevated Western observers is probably its marketing campaign, namely, the alternative to submitting to castration and lifelong drug dependencey being either thrown from the roof of a tall building or hanged from a building crane.I guess Iran’s practices are something of an improvement over those in the Ottoman Empire for castrating slaves.
As a lesbian, I know almost nothing about male sexuality and the choices that gay men make in terms of self-presentation. But coming out during the early days of the Gay Liberation Movement, I knew many feminine cross-dressing gay men who had masculine boyfriends and no sexual interest in women whatsoever. They were of a type; without benefit of estrogen, they were intrinsically feminine gay men.
The first autogynephile we encountered was a guy who crashed our lesbian social club in the late 1970s. AGP wasn't a term yet, but he was obviously a man, a masculine husband and father, on the prowl for a female partner, which he made very clear. Gay and AGP are distinct categories.
My thoroughly unscientific theory is that being gay in the first half of the 20th century (and for eons beforehand) was a cross to bear, which accounted for the proliferation of underground gay culture for both sexes. At the same time, gays were getting tired of being pariahs. Hyper-feminine drag queens began to express their homosexuality in the most public, overt way available to them at the time.
Maybe (probably?) dressing as women had an erotic charge for them. If so, my guess would be because it caught the eyes of the men they were attracted to, not because they were attracted to women. Homosexuality is more accepted now, and the need for drag is less urgent. Also, AGP urges start very young, just like homosexuality, and it can be hard for a boy to know what's what.
Lastly, kids today have had their brains scrambled by the idiocy of trans indoctrination, so they have no idea what or who they are or why they feel any of the ways they do. Ideology overrides reality and every child is at risk.
Whilst growing up with an involuntary opposite sex body image sixty years ago was difficult, I cannot imagine the difficulties which children must face having their brains scrambled with trans ideology thrown at them persistently on social media, as you say. I'm very glad that I knew I wanted this before I even knew it was possible since that excludes the possibility of having been influenced, as so many are today.
My usual iron self-restraint is failing me. The question persists in my head this morning, why the fuck has it taken this long for what should have been the obvious question when trans was first invented and became a "thing" to get the attention it should have had from the beginning.
Two factors apparently contributed to the suppression of any questioning of trans mythology. First was the unwarranted enthusiasm among academics and other aspiring "intellectuals" for any sort of attack on Western or post Enlightenment thinking, no matter how preposterous, provided it is expressed in a sufficiently opaque, polysyllabic vocabulary. This is the thinking that fought the closing of the gay bathhouses in the '80's on the grounds that anonymous, promiscuous sex was "indispensable" to a "gay lifestyle". It's the idea directly responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of gay men from AIDS. It's the radical chic of the attack on Pete Buttigieg on grounds his marriage and stable family life were too "heteronormative" and not sufficiently flamboyant to be models for young gay people.
Second, the dearth of healthy skepticism regarding trans mythology is the result of the malignant grandiosity of too many of our would-be public intellectuals, the absence of any appropriate intellectual humility. To be blunt, they don't know what the fuck they're talking about. A heterosexual cannot, 𝘪𝘯 𝘱𝘳𝘪𝘯𝘤𝘪𝘱𝘭𝘦, have the least idea of what it is like to grow up gay, to be twelve years old and experiencing feelings totally the opposite of what you've been told to expect, and to know in your gut you'd better keep it strictly to yourself. No wonder struggling with this turmoil leads to some terrible conclusions! A straight person cannot imagine it any more than any of us can have any sensible idea of what it's like to be, say, a bat.
I can say all this from personal experience. When at twelve years old I first started having vague but conscious feelings of attraction to other boys, I invented a half dozen or so nonsensical theories to explain it to myself. It wasn't easy. I had heard of "queers", of course, but thought they didn't exist, were a myth, something like vampires. I must, therefore, be the only one in the world. One of those theories was that I was in some inexplicable, mystical way "really" a girl. Luckily for me, I was born 70 years before the trans fad got any traction, so i discarded that idea pretty promptly. What saved my sanity albeit not entirely in a healthy way was reading in one of my mother's psychology textbooks that many, perhaps a third, of pubescent boys experimented with some sort of sexual activity with other boys but usually grew out of it. I held onto that comforting thought until well after it made any sense.
Face it. The slogan, "A child knows who he is" is drooling nonsense. Anyone who says it with a straight face should be shouted down with utmost contempt. What children need to be taught is that they are perfect exactly the way God made them. They don't need cancer drugs or opposite sex hormones or brutal disfiguring surgery to make them into ersatz versions of something they cannot ever be. And health care professionals whose thinking leads to the same conclusions as those of the medieval obscurantist mullahs of Iran really need to reexamine their premises.
Unfortunately, the majority of gay people will nod their heads along to the liberal media because anything and everything Trump does is bad...or as one gay man said to me, 'trans people didn't cause tariffs!!!' (Because, you know, everything is related to tariffs now, and everyone is suddenly an expert on tariffs.)
People have their 'news' catered to them, and they believe everything 'their' 'news' tells them. And liberals will continue to fearmonger, as they have for the past DECADE, about 'what Trump's gonna do' while ignoring completely ALLLLLLLL the damage the Democats have done. The average person will read 'their news' and deride the new administration's HHS report, while being completely ignorant of the name Rachel Levine.
NPR is one of the worst of the worst. And I know -- I used to work there. I know how it operates. Its so-called reporting on this issue is appalling. It's so heavily biased -- and entirely UNscientific -- it boggles the mind.
I've tried -- and so have former colleagues of mine -- to wake them up about their bullshit, but it's hopeless.
I wrote about it here, but it won't make a dent. NPR is totally captured by trans ideology and won't be swayed.
Cowardice On Parade: NPR, NYT, WaPo, and the “Free” Press
While I fully accept that 'gender affirming care' is mostly a mistaken approach, I must contend the suggestion in this article that *all* those seeking medical gender reassignment are simply gay and were influenced to seek medical reassignment by precursors, such as Christine Jorgensen being influenced by the story of Lili Elbe.
For myself I knew that I wanted to be a girl when I was about five, or possibly slightly before. I couldn't help it, it was completely involuntary, I felt guilty about it and did everything I could to suppress these thoughts, without success.
This occurred about sixty five years ago. I never managed to change these involuntary thoughts and self image of myself as a girl though I tried very hard to do so. There were never any influences, I never read anything (as a child of five in an ex-patriate family in West Africa) which could possibly have influenced me, I was not sexually abused and I can recall nothing that might have introduced the idea to me.
As I say, I fully accept that this has been grossly overdone in recent years, my book The War on Gender ~ Postmodernism and Trans Identity prefigured the Cass Report in my criticism of the massive rise in irreversible treatments of minor and I agree with Dr Allen Frances that there has been a massive rise in over diagnosis.
However, for some of us this was a real experience. I eventually began my medical transition some forty years ago, I adapted to my new phase in life and I have never regretted it. The principal concern of my book was to critique radical transgenderism, Butlerian 'linguistic performative gender' and hopefully prevent some of those young people who have been misdirected into medical care from making irreversible decisions which they later regret, unlike me.
Unfortunately the pushback has gone so far that the original phenomenon, which was described in great detail by Dr Harry Benjamin nearly sixty years ago is denied existence and gencrits will consider any explanation other than that there may be an underlying neurological condition such as Professor VS Ramachandran's body mapping hypothesis (2007) which I mention frequently in my blog posts but which is ignored because it is an hypothesis which potentially gives an objective explanation for why we have this involuntary body self image.
I also posit AGP can be influenced and encouraged by needy mentally unstable girlfriends in addition to porn, body image issues. Some of these girls take pride in styling hair, make up and dressing them.
I notice that the media coverage always highlights the fact that the authors of the report are anonymous. If those authors were disclosed, would detractors then view the report more favorably? Somehow, I think not; it's just an activist talking point, intended to discredit.
Yes, exactly. It's called the genetic fallacy -- discrediting info based on the source of that info rather than the content.
We're all guilty of it at one time or another, of course. But it's a particularly pernicious logical fallacy (well, hell, aren't they all).
Thanks for this. Intent to discredit is rife in the gencrit world. I recently had an interview with Stella O'Malley which I refused permission to publish since the entire hour was focussed on attempting to discredit me, corner me into admitting to being AGP, and skilfully avoiding the points I had raised in correspondence such as critiquing Helen Joyce's book in which she made numerous false claims and representations. Look up the blogs on my page critical of her book. This is part 1, there is a part 2. https://claireraerandall.substack.com/p/review-of-helen-joyce-trans-when
I think you have misunderstood my comment. I think the discrediting will come from gender ideologues and trans rights activists who do not like the conclusions of this report.
Okay, fair enough that was what you intended.
But my comment about gencrits seeking to discredit actual transsexuals still stands. My conversation with O'Malley was like being faced with the Spanish Inquisition since she persistently attempted to push interpretations to which she tried to get me to confess but which I was resistant to, while avoiding going near my critiques of Helen Joyce.
It seems to mean nothing to some that I myself am critical of 'trans ideology'. I never needed it, it never even existed when I went through my process forty years ago. I think the hard line gender critics are blind to historical context in this.
The problem I see is that while I am highly critical of the ideology, such as 'self ID' I am treated as if I am one of those pushing early irreversible medical treatments when I go to great lengths in my book to warn against it due to the exponential rise of minor treatments by the Tavistock in the twenty teens, clearly contagion and ideology working overtime.
I can certainly relate to being misinterpreted, yes, and I am sorry that has happened to you. I know I don't like being told that because I think sex is real and that it matters in some social/legal situations that I hate trans people and want them to die. Hopefully, those of us who willing to assume others are acting in good faith can break through the noise created by those who insist that disagreement equals malice.
Thankyou. I just want people to consider the possibility that my own story is true. I was pleased that in my first podcast interview Alexander Wolfheze called my personal account 'authentic'. That meant a lot.
Thank you for this article. It raises important points that need to be made. I wonder what percentage of autogynephiles are gay, though. Being aroused by imagining yourself as a woman and being a same-sex attracted man seem at odds to me. This cohort of young men seems to have little in common with, say, the gay guys who go to Provincetown, who take care of their male bodies and who appear perfectly happy to have no women around. I wonder if some of these AGP young men are depressed and lonely straight guys with OCD and body issues. Not that they should lose their fertility and sexual function either!
I believe you’re correct—AGP young men are usually straight, and if you listen to their stories, they were often exposed to certain kinds of porn that caused them to fixate on themselves as women. BUT that doesn’t change the fact that young kids who are gay are being told they’ve been born in the wrong bodies. This pattern has a precedent in Islamic countries where homosexuality is punishable by death. Tehran was once the gender reassignment capital of the world, and may still be.
As a therapist myself my professional opinion is that a therapist should not tell their client what the solution to their problem is. Neither should they completely agree with the client. The purpose of a therapist is to help the client to understand their problem and come to the best possible resolution of it. Clearly 'therapists' who rush to tell children that they are 'trans' and hurry them onto puberty blockers are engaged in malpractice and should be barred from practising.
The last I saw, Iran was in second place, behind Thailand, the destination of choice for medical tourism, especially for sex change surgeries. It does stand out, however, for providing government subsidies for “affirming” treatments. What's holding it back from more vocal approval of its advanced public policy among more spiritually elevated Western observers is probably its marketing campaign, namely, the alternative to submitting to castration and lifelong drug dependencey being either thrown from the roof of a tall building or hanged from a building crane.I guess Iran’s practices are something of an improvement over those in the Ottoman Empire for castrating slaves.
Excellent article, as always.
As a lesbian, I know almost nothing about male sexuality and the choices that gay men make in terms of self-presentation. But coming out during the early days of the Gay Liberation Movement, I knew many feminine cross-dressing gay men who had masculine boyfriends and no sexual interest in women whatsoever. They were of a type; without benefit of estrogen, they were intrinsically feminine gay men.
The first autogynephile we encountered was a guy who crashed our lesbian social club in the late 1970s. AGP wasn't a term yet, but he was obviously a man, a masculine husband and father, on the prowl for a female partner, which he made very clear. Gay and AGP are distinct categories.
My thoroughly unscientific theory is that being gay in the first half of the 20th century (and for eons beforehand) was a cross to bear, which accounted for the proliferation of underground gay culture for both sexes. At the same time, gays were getting tired of being pariahs. Hyper-feminine drag queens began to express their homosexuality in the most public, overt way available to them at the time.
Maybe (probably?) dressing as women had an erotic charge for them. If so, my guess would be because it caught the eyes of the men they were attracted to, not because they were attracted to women. Homosexuality is more accepted now, and the need for drag is less urgent. Also, AGP urges start very young, just like homosexuality, and it can be hard for a boy to know what's what.
Lastly, kids today have had their brains scrambled by the idiocy of trans indoctrination, so they have no idea what or who they are or why they feel any of the ways they do. Ideology overrides reality and every child is at risk.
Whilst growing up with an involuntary opposite sex body image sixty years ago was difficult, I cannot imagine the difficulties which children must face having their brains scrambled with trans ideology thrown at them persistently on social media, as you say. I'm very glad that I knew I wanted this before I even knew it was possible since that excludes the possibility of having been influenced, as so many are today.
My usual iron self-restraint is failing me. The question persists in my head this morning, why the fuck has it taken this long for what should have been the obvious question when trans was first invented and became a "thing" to get the attention it should have had from the beginning.
Two factors apparently contributed to the suppression of any questioning of trans mythology. First was the unwarranted enthusiasm among academics and other aspiring "intellectuals" for any sort of attack on Western or post Enlightenment thinking, no matter how preposterous, provided it is expressed in a sufficiently opaque, polysyllabic vocabulary. This is the thinking that fought the closing of the gay bathhouses in the '80's on the grounds that anonymous, promiscuous sex was "indispensable" to a "gay lifestyle". It's the idea directly responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of gay men from AIDS. It's the radical chic of the attack on Pete Buttigieg on grounds his marriage and stable family life were too "heteronormative" and not sufficiently flamboyant to be models for young gay people.
Second, the dearth of healthy skepticism regarding trans mythology is the result of the malignant grandiosity of too many of our would-be public intellectuals, the absence of any appropriate intellectual humility. To be blunt, they don't know what the fuck they're talking about. A heterosexual cannot, 𝘪𝘯 𝘱𝘳𝘪𝘯𝘤𝘪𝘱𝘭𝘦, have the least idea of what it is like to grow up gay, to be twelve years old and experiencing feelings totally the opposite of what you've been told to expect, and to know in your gut you'd better keep it strictly to yourself. No wonder struggling with this turmoil leads to some terrible conclusions! A straight person cannot imagine it any more than any of us can have any sensible idea of what it's like to be, say, a bat.
I can say all this from personal experience. When at twelve years old I first started having vague but conscious feelings of attraction to other boys, I invented a half dozen or so nonsensical theories to explain it to myself. It wasn't easy. I had heard of "queers", of course, but thought they didn't exist, were a myth, something like vampires. I must, therefore, be the only one in the world. One of those theories was that I was in some inexplicable, mystical way "really" a girl. Luckily for me, I was born 70 years before the trans fad got any traction, so i discarded that idea pretty promptly. What saved my sanity albeit not entirely in a healthy way was reading in one of my mother's psychology textbooks that many, perhaps a third, of pubescent boys experimented with some sort of sexual activity with other boys but usually grew out of it. I held onto that comforting thought until well after it made any sense.
Face it. The slogan, "A child knows who he is" is drooling nonsense. Anyone who says it with a straight face should be shouted down with utmost contempt. What children need to be taught is that they are perfect exactly the way God made them. They don't need cancer drugs or opposite sex hormones or brutal disfiguring surgery to make them into ersatz versions of something they cannot ever be. And health care professionals whose thinking leads to the same conclusions as those of the medieval obscurantist mullahs of Iran really need to reexamine their premises.
One of the best comments among so many I've read on this subject on Substack. Thank you, John Robert. I'm glad I follow you.
Unfortunately, the majority of gay people will nod their heads along to the liberal media because anything and everything Trump does is bad...or as one gay man said to me, 'trans people didn't cause tariffs!!!' (Because, you know, everything is related to tariffs now, and everyone is suddenly an expert on tariffs.)
People have their 'news' catered to them, and they believe everything 'their' 'news' tells them. And liberals will continue to fearmonger, as they have for the past DECADE, about 'what Trump's gonna do' while ignoring completely ALLLLLLLL the damage the Democats have done. The average person will read 'their news' and deride the new administration's HHS report, while being completely ignorant of the name Rachel Levine.
NPR is one of the worst of the worst. And I know -- I used to work there. I know how it operates. Its so-called reporting on this issue is appalling. It's so heavily biased -- and entirely UNscientific -- it boggles the mind.
I've tried -- and so have former colleagues of mine -- to wake them up about their bullshit, but it's hopeless.
I wrote about it here, but it won't make a dent. NPR is totally captured by trans ideology and won't be swayed.
Cowardice On Parade: NPR, NYT, WaPo, and the “Free” Press
https://lisasimeone.substack.com/p/cowardice-on-parade-npr-nyt-wapo
While I fully accept that 'gender affirming care' is mostly a mistaken approach, I must contend the suggestion in this article that *all* those seeking medical gender reassignment are simply gay and were influenced to seek medical reassignment by precursors, such as Christine Jorgensen being influenced by the story of Lili Elbe.
For myself I knew that I wanted to be a girl when I was about five, or possibly slightly before. I couldn't help it, it was completely involuntary, I felt guilty about it and did everything I could to suppress these thoughts, without success.
This occurred about sixty five years ago. I never managed to change these involuntary thoughts and self image of myself as a girl though I tried very hard to do so. There were never any influences, I never read anything (as a child of five in an ex-patriate family in West Africa) which could possibly have influenced me, I was not sexually abused and I can recall nothing that might have introduced the idea to me.
As I say, I fully accept that this has been grossly overdone in recent years, my book The War on Gender ~ Postmodernism and Trans Identity prefigured the Cass Report in my criticism of the massive rise in irreversible treatments of minor and I agree with Dr Allen Frances that there has been a massive rise in over diagnosis.
However, for some of us this was a real experience. I eventually began my medical transition some forty years ago, I adapted to my new phase in life and I have never regretted it. The principal concern of my book was to critique radical transgenderism, Butlerian 'linguistic performative gender' and hopefully prevent some of those young people who have been misdirected into medical care from making irreversible decisions which they later regret, unlike me.
Unfortunately the pushback has gone so far that the original phenomenon, which was described in great detail by Dr Harry Benjamin nearly sixty years ago is denied existence and gencrits will consider any explanation other than that there may be an underlying neurological condition such as Professor VS Ramachandran's body mapping hypothesis (2007) which I mention frequently in my blog posts but which is ignored because it is an hypothesis which potentially gives an objective explanation for why we have this involuntary body self image.
My book https://www.amazon.co.uk/War-Gender-Postmodernism-Trans-Identity/dp/1914208811/
I also posit AGP can be influenced and encouraged by needy mentally unstable girlfriends in addition to porn, body image issues. Some of these girls take pride in styling hair, make up and dressing them.