Understanding Transmisogyny, Part Six: Epistemic Vandalism
On judgment without trial.
“I am a monument to all of your sins.”
— The Gravemind, Halo 2
Trigger Warning: the incalculable violence that has for aeons chewed up and spat out our sisters and our foremothers and that will continue to consume the lives and dignities of women whose names we’ll never know until the day we finally bring about its end.
Introduction: “Gender Affirmation”
In 2025, researchers from the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya published a study in the journal Revista de Derecho Penal y Criminología, called Mujeres Cis y Transexuales que Practican Sexo de Pago: Involucracion y Consecuencias (or: Cisgender and Transgender Women Who Engage in Paid Sex: Involvement and Consequences). The researchers had interviewed 76 sex workers—largely migrants, 50 of them cis, 26 transsexual—and according to the article, sought to challenge prevailing orthodoxies and narratives surrounding sex work and trafficking.
It was a short and edifying read, concluding with a plea for decriminalization (or at least, fewer regulations that make the lives of sex workers harder) and cautioning against a certain tendency to believe all sex workers are trafficked. The study indicated that about 25% of the surveyed participants were “deceived by another person”—so could be considered ‘trafficked’—while 84% indicated they made the decision “due to a lack of financial resources”.
One section of the article in particular stood out to me, though: the section on transsexual women. An interesting assertion about their motivations caught my eye:
“However, in the case of transsexual women, the decision is often related to a desire to affirm their sexual identity and to a sense of fun.”
For those less familiar with the discursive currents of online Gender-Conservative communities, this phrase in particular registered as alarming because of the pervasive transmisogynistic talking point that sexual violence against trans women is “less severe” than that against “real women” because—and I have heard this verbatim—we asked for it. The “choice” to be transsexual, to pursue transition and present to the world as a woman is cast entirely as a sexual fetish and an open invitation to be violated. The transmisogynist is almost convinced that trans women cannot be assaulted because we view any assault or sexual exploitation as affirming—and presumably because the Amazon basics skirt is too short, too.
So to ascribe the principal motivation of transsexual sex workers to “a sense of fun”, when the article’s very next paragraph admits that 61% of the transsexual women interviewed began sex work as children, felt more than a little dissonant.
Since I don’t speak Spanish, I had to rely on machine-translation in order to investigate the actual text of the paper, so it’s possible that there is some nuance that escaped me. At the same time, the English-language article seemed to have drawn this conclusion from the paper itself, though it is difficult to understand how the researchers could have concluded what they did based on the actual excerpts of these women’s testimony. The study claims that one of its main contributions is the comparison between cis and trans women, and that “it is worth highlighting that [trans women] engage in paid sex not so much as a result of pressure from third parties but rather as an option to serve personal goals, among which the need to affirm their sexual identity stands out.” [Emphasis mine.]
Meanwhile, here are some of the testimonial snippets from trans women the researchers provided.
“My status as a transgender woman forces me to work in prostitution. If I don’t have an employment contract, how else do I make a living?” (ID40)
“My transgender status: I’m a trans woman, and prostitution is your survival option. Who hires a trans woman?” (ID47)
“Because I wanted money and didn’t have job opportunities, and I also wanted my female body.” (ID76)
These statements certainly point to external, economic factors that the women clearly identified, pointing to their lack of options, not “lack of pressure”. It seems that the desire for transition that one of them expressed, alongside employment discrimination, was what the cis researchers chose to zoom in and focus on.
There is also a longer statement from one of the trans participants, whose translation I’ve reproduced here:
“I wanted money, parties, drugs, surgery, and everything that made me more feminine. When I arrived in Spain, I wanted to find a new life, where I could be a woman and start from scratch, but once here, I continued with the same old thing. Besides, I didn’t have any papers, so what else could I do …? I wanted to feel like a complete woman. I wanted surgery, my family didn’t understand the situation; it was a very closed-minded town, and they were embarrassed. I started experimenting, and trying to raise money for the surgery. I had breast surgery at age 15.” [Emphasis mine].
Not only do the researchers rather selectively overlook the socioeconomic factors that compel these women to take up sex work, they further conclude that trans women have “a more recreational tendency that leads them to experiment with and relativize the negative impact of the activity”. Such an inference is almost certainly derived from the researchers refusing to view access to transition care as a necessity, and considering trans women resorting to sex work as seeking to fund a frivolity. There is no engagement with their own finding that most of the trans women faced disownment and societal transmisogyny that led them to start as minors, and that perhaps their attraction to the “glamorous lifestyle” they were promised could be treated as more in line with the other deceived (cis) women than as “a recreational tendency”.
A fundamental incuriosity and frank indifference towards the reality of trans women’s oppression pervades these remarks, which despite finding that trans women enter the trade younger, stay longer, and have a harder time leaving than cis women, never once cares to connect that to wider transmisogynistic structures and forces. Instead, cis people’s biases, their insistence on viewing us as fetishists first and marginalized women never, takes precedence and is featured over and above their own data, their own findings, and indeed, over and above trans women’s own fucking words.
This unnamed, unexamined cissexism is hardly limited to this one study, this one topic, or even this one discipline. Regular readers may recall a section of The Third Sex, where Serena Nanda relates a hijra’s account of being deemed a not-woman by a third party due to her inability to give birth, and claims that as evidence that hijra view themselves as not-women. This despite the fact that in the story itself, the hijra subject asserts, rather unambiguously, “I am a lady.”
In fact, this blatant scholarly gaslighting, this impetus to demand readers ignore the evidence of our own lying eyes, manifests even in Janice Raymond’s Transsexual Empire. In the third chapter of that book (Mother’s Feminized Phallus, Father’s Castrated Femme), she discusses interviewing 15 transsexuals and finding them all to believe and reinforce “feminine stereotypes”. She also includes this little tidbit.
“R. also made the very important point that one of the reasons transsexuals may seem to conform exaggeratedly to the stereotype is that they have to prove to the gender identity clinics that they can pass (i.e., live, work, dress, and be accepted) as women.” [Emphasis mine.]
Despite being told the fucking answer, Raymond had no interest in examining the hypersurveillance and policing employed by male-led institutions gatekeeping critical healthcare from vulnerable women, and instead proceeded with her agenda of vilification.
We are not seen as thinking, feeling, hurting women, but as curiosities and symbols and exoticities, as freaks to be discussed and consumed and fucked, but never consulted, never respected, and never honestly seen as equal.
And all of cis society, especially its fucking “intellectual arm”, its vaunted episteme, stands guilty of this shameless, unrepentant, libidinous dehumanization.
Part One: Autosapiophiles
Mad Tranny Disease
The history of trans women’s pathologization is severely under-discussed, even amongst proponents of trans rights, who often default to leaving the availability, legality, and allowance of transition “up to the experts”. Many a well-meaning advocate has uttered some variant of “the science is on our side”, unwittingly eliding how “the science” has for a very long time treated queerness as an aberration to correct, or an ailment to be cured. Modern trans history is, in many ways, inseparable from the history of its vilification, regulation, and attempted eradication by medical establishments.
The earliest theories that attempted to grapple with the existence of the transsexual woman conceptualized us as a sort of tragic homosexual gone mad, a faggot so desperate to be “fucked by real men” that she begins to desperately desire womanhood. German psychiatrist Richard von Krafft Ebing published Psychopathis Sexualis in 1886 as a treatise on “sexual deviance”; his belief was that homosexuality is a “condition” that manifests primarily in (cis) men who wish to have sex with (cis) men “as women do”. (Readers may recall that this reflects wider patriarchal discourses on penetrability that could, under some social regimes, spare those who take the ‘active’, penetrating role in sex from the stigma of being branded homosexual.)
Berlin’s Third Sex, published in 1904 by Magnus Hirschfeld, himself a gay man, took a rather more sympathetic and even celebratory view of Wilhelmine Germany’s gay subcultures. (This is the same Magnus Hirschfeld whose Institute for Sexual Research was targeted by the Nazis, to burn its books and research papers.) He detailed stories of transvestism, cabaret, and gender-variant individuals, and his choice of title illustrates how the concept of an ‘in-between’ or third sex in scholarship has always been oriented around the penetrable male—‘men’ who ‘take it’.
Of course, the destruction of Hirschfeld’s Institute and the Nazi regime’s retrenchment of the homophobia he fought against all his life had implications for the academic perception of transsexuality. US psychiatrist David Cauldwell launched the next volley in the century-long war between scholars of sex and queer communities, coining the term ‘transsexual’ in his 1949 essay with the clever, clever title of Psychopathia Transexualis. Trans women are pathologized as having “criminal and unsocial tendencies”, and Cauldwell’s prescription for our gender-madness is to just… not. Could us icky trannies just stop trying to crossdress and change sex? The essay holds that transsexuals do not need gender-affirming care and instead need to be freed from this aberrant, unnatural compulsion—that is, it advocates for conversion therapy, for discouraging transsexuals from exhibiting ‘gender-variant’ behavior, and treating transsexuality as a disease to cure.
It was this prevailing consensus that endocrinologist and sexologist Harry Benjamin was responding to when he began to advocate for providing (some) transsexuals with access to transition care. Benjamin, in fact, worked with Cauldwell and other psychiatrists, with whom he disagreed on the question of providing trans patients with surgical and hormonal treatments. He codified his approach in The Transsexual Phenomenon, published in 1966, where he would discuss his diagnostic criteria for those he calls the “true transsexuals”.
Benjamin had a “Sexual Orientation Scale” ranging from 1-6, with “transvestites” at 1 and “true transsexuals” at 6. Number 6 is our familiar faggot-gone-mad, she who only yearns for a Real Man and is simply too distressed by her lack of vagina and womanly attributes to be a productive, functional member of society. It is the sixers (and perhaps the occasional fiver) who Benjamin designates as a worthy, deserving recipient of the magnanimous gifts of sex reassignment surgery and oestrogen. The rest—those of us who aren’t distressed enough about our sex organs, or who for some arcane and incomprehensible reason aren’t irresistibly drawn to men—were welcome to, scientifically speaking, go fuck ourselves.
Though Harry Benjamin credits the high-profile Christine Jorgensen with ‘furthering his understanding’ of trans issues, he largely did his work and spoke out without the input of trans women (aside from white, middle-class, conservative ‘transgenderist’ Virginia Prince). While his model may have been an improvement over the categorization of transsexuality as a criminal disorder, it encoded certain cissexist biases regarding the perception of trans women into its recommendations. Specifically, it sought to rank trans women by how “deserving” we are of treatment, based on how well we conform to an ideal of womanhood centered around heterosexuality—that is, male-supremacy and male-attraction. By contrast, those of us who fell short of this ideal were still stigmatized, still considered “fetishists” or cross-dressers, regarded as no more than men who got a sexual thrill by behaving like or thinking of themselves as women. The Benjamin scale established a still-antagonistic psychiatric approach, of discernment between the mad faggots genuinely in distress and the male perverts in lingerie who aren’t really transsexual but still seek transsexual care for… reasons. Gross ones, probably.
Benjamin’s ideas were influential enough that WPATH—the organization of (largely cis) medical professionals that sets the current Standards of Care for trans people worldwide—was initially named HBIGDA, or the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association. The most up-to-date versions of WPATH’s SoC purport to be much more enlightened and current and oh so much more respectful of trans people’s delicate little sensibilities, but as any good lawyer knows, there is a wide gulf between pretty words and actual implementation. Many Gender Identity Clinics worldwide do not follow an informed consent model for access to healthcare, and a great many seem to be using SoC a few versions out of date—erroneously, one hopes. While the meaningless drivel that trannies spout is of no great import, I will admit that an awful lot of trans women I’ve spoken to report horror stories when recounting their interactions with psychiatrists and clinicians and endocrinologists, who treat every evaluation as an investigation, trying to sniff out the tell-tale signs that their patients are insufficiently feminine or not actually raging mancock addicts. Many of us have been asked deeply invasive questions about how we masturbate and what our sexual fantasies are like—even as minors seeking care.
If any cis readers sat up in their seats and wondered, “Wait, isn’t that illegal, or at least grossly inappropriate?”, then congratulations! You’re starting to get how little anyone gives a fuck about trannies.
This does not even touch upon RLE, or “real-life experience”, an outdated (yet still not entirely abolished!) practice of forcing trans people to live full-time as their ‘chosen’ genders, for multiple years, but without any transition care. Readers who may be aware of the phenomena known as ‘patriarchy’, ‘homophobia’, and even the esoteric concept of ‘transmisogyny’, perhaps realize how this amounts to little more than hazing, torture, and a challenge to survive as a visibly gender-variant, ‘deviant’ individual—irrespective of how hostile one’s material circumstances may be or how one’s very employers may react—for the potential reward of getting to transition bodily afterwards.
Simply put, many medical “experts” on trans people and transition care do not appear to have our best interests at heart. By acting as gatekeepers to lifesaving medication, predicated on navigating byzantine psychosexual gauntlets and not pissing off your asshole doctor too hard, these ‘professionals’ not only wield an undue amount of power over trans patients, not only are enabled to neglect, under-dose, and dismiss large numbers of people in need, but also are in a position to browbeat and abuse vulnerable, marginal, precarious people. Which occurs not infrequently. The very foundation of knowledge about trans people is this hostile, antagonistic, and cissexist milieu that still in many ways pathologizes and villanizes us, and many medical institutions entrusted with the responsibility of transition care are not merely hilariously unaccountable to our wellbeing, but largely structured to treat our existence as a problem to manage, guinea pigs to dissect, and indeed a plague to keep under control.
In fact, the modern anti-trans movement relies heavily on this history, building on the academic and scholarly disgust with trannies to inform contemporary propaganda and conjure the demonized specters of perverted, predatory males trying to access “women’s spaces” for sexually deviant and rapacious reasons. Benjamin did not invent the ‘fetishistic transvestite’—Hitchcock’s Psycho was released in 1960, after all—but it did give legitimacy to an already culturally-prevalent idea. Unattracted to men, aroused by women’s clothing, patriarchal ideas of gender constructed this she-male, this monster encroaching upon bathrooms and prisons and sports to snatch up your poor, innocent girls.
Boo.
This gendered boogeywoman has many architects, but none so notorious as the Canadian fossil who is aroused by the idea that he has any idea worth speaking aloud. For ‘transvestite’ isn’t quite what trans women as a whole and trans lesbians in particular are slurred as these days—there’s a much more colorful term that our biggest fans are overly fond of.
Autogynephile. The monstrous creep who commits the cardinal sin of looking at her immaculate fit in the mirror and thinking, “Hot stuff”.
There’s a Margaret Atwood quote I always think of when discussing this subject: “Male fantasies, male fantasies, is everything run by male fantasies? Up on a pedestal or down on your knees, it’s all a male fantasy: that you’re strong enough to take what they dish out, or else too weak to do anything about it. Even pretending you aren’t catering to male fantasies is a male fantasy: pretending you’re unseen, pretending you have a life of your own, that you can wash your feet and comb your hair unconscious of the ever-present watcher peering through the keyhole, peering through the keyhole in your own head, if nowhere else. You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.” [Emphasis mine.]
One might argue that in a society whose foundation is patriarchy, where those sexed as men are empowered to regard those sexed as lesser as though they are consumable sexual commodities, many of us excluded from the humanity afforded manhood learn that our self-worth is rooted almost entirely in our desirability. That feeling a sense of comfort, power, safety, and yes, even a certain erotic fulfillment, in the idea of oneself as a desirable object who may lack patriarchal agency but can nonetheless inspire devotion and fixation and covetousness with a mere flash of the ankle, is simply what “women’s sexuality” is conditioned to be. That perhaps, far from observing some inconceivable paraphilia, sexologists simply observed “women’s sexuality” in “male subjects”, and freaked the fuck out as their pretty little heads couldn’t cope with the ramifications that has for a society founded on the sex-class difference.
Alternatively, one might become a figurehead for an international hate movement because they were the only ones who saw any merit to the shit-doodles you farted out on some loose leaf in the 80s.
I Can Never Repay Christa Peterson
Christa Peterson is a Philosophy PhD student who, in 2023, left critical comments on a few ‘research’ papers on PubPeer that supposedly substantiate the theory of autogynephilia. This commentary is, of course, not peer-reviewed, but given the shit I’ve seen get published on the topic of trannies, that hardly counts against it. Peterson takes this dubious ‘evidence base’ to task, finding myriad issues with its methodology, assertions, interpretation of data, and ethics. Her thorough, uncompromising review of this pseudoscientific collection of tranny abuse is informative and illuminating in equal measure, shedding a light on just how shoddy your work can be as long as you’re pathologizing the undesirables.
Phallometric detection of fetishistic arousal in heterosexual male cross-dressers (1986)
This is the big one. This particular paper is concerned with how tranny fetishists are lying liars, and the brave truth-seeking authors proved that actually, trannies who deny being cross-dressing fetishists are cross-dressing fetishists—by hooking their penises up to blood flow machines and making them listen to descriptions of cross-dressing fantasies.
So this is already a fever dream of sexological nonsense, but Peterson points out how the paper simply failed to prove this. Leaving aside that volumetric boner analysis is not an ironclad method of proving arousal—sometimes it just gets hard in stressful situations—the paper was not able to prove its thesis because their data did not pass the commonly accepted boner measurement standards. A 1996 survey shows that 17 out of 37 boner analysis centers agree that you need to measure enough blood flow to constitute roughly 20% of a full boner for it to count as significant.
This paper set that threshold to 2% of a boner instead.
Two.
Fucking.
Percent.
It is likely the threshold was set this low because the subjects under study were largely on oestrogen and unconcerned with penile atrophy, which only compounds how much of a farce this whole circus act is. Trying to prove that women who can barely get hard are aroused by cross-dressing fantasies via chasing ghosts in the boner-volume machine is already something of an Ahabian venture, but Peterson points out that there were still more depths to sink to.
The usual metric for ‘proving’ fetishism through boner calculus is to measure a subject’s dongle response to “atypical sexual stimuli”, contrasted against their shaft inflation value for “typical sexual stimuli”. (And so we have left anything resembling a study uncolored by researcher opinions on what is ‘normal’ far, far behind.) But our esteemed cranks could not prove fetishism this way, and so they invented an alternative metric: comparing the subject’s erectile expansion coefficient in response to “atypical sexual stimuli” with their eschlongation value when exposed to… completely non-sexual stimuli.
What do you find hotter, a description of two women going on a date, or a documentary on shoveling snow?
That is also not an exaggeration: the “atypical”, “fetishistic”, “cross-dressing” fantasies that the subjects listened to? They can be summarized as “your girlfriend thinks you look really hot in a dress”, or “you think you look pretty in the dress you picked out when you look in the mirror”. I could write scenarios more risqué if you lobotomized me first. This was contrasted with “stimuli” such as the sentence “You hear the sound of a snowplow coming down your street.”
I fucking love science!
And the best part is, we haven’t even covered the dubiously ethical conduct yet!
Peterson notes that the gender identity clinic where this “research” was conducted was a nightmare, with a reputation for basically treating its trans patients like guinea pigs and having little regard for consent. Trans women subjected themselves to it anyway because “public insurance in Ontario only covered surgery for patients approved by the Clarke”. Refusing to undergo phallometric testing could get patients labeled as uncooperative, even though the clinic’s evaluation process for surgery did not consider the results of this testing at all—patients had to do two years of “RLE” to be approved.
One patient was unwittingly made the subject of a lecture without prior consent; the assessing psychiatrist said if the patient insisted on rescheduling then the next appointment wouldn’t be for six months, forcing compliance. The clinic’s very first patient, Dianna Boileau, was subject to the invasive phallometric test without being told it was not part of her surgery evaluation. The literal fucking inventor of the dongflationary statistics machine, in a 1974 paper, casually mentions injecting transsexual women at this clinic with intramuscular testerone before doing the test, in a segment talking about unruly patients. No mention is made of securing consent, and given that trans women do not, as a rule, like the idea of being injected with virilizing doses of testosterone, and taking into account how commonplace coercive abuses of power are in patient testimonies, the circumstances under which these patients were injected likely weren’t pleasant!
But like, who are you going to believe? Penis mathematicians, or trannies?
Nonhomosexual gender dysphoria (1988)
As a disclaimer, “homosexual” is used in this paper in an implicitly misgendering manner, to describe trans women attracted to men. Trans lesbians are called “heterosexual”, and there are bisexual and asexual subjects as well.
The point of this paper is to prove that only those trans women (exclusively) attracted to men have gender dysphoria; everyone else is a filthy autogynephile. The author of the paper, clearly already fast approaching senescence, means to prove this by administering an “Are you gay?” quiz. Peterson notes that the quiz was designed by the author, and comments that it is “extremely irregular”.
“Q8 of the gynephilia scale, where high scores are reported as sexual interest in women, and low scores as lack of it, is: Was there any period of 14 days or less when you had sexual intercourse with a female age 17-40 more than 5 times?”
“(+ 1.1) yes”
“(-0.1) no, and you are older than 25”
“(-0.9) no, and you are 25 or younger.”
Once again, recall that these papers operate under the assumption that trannies are lying liars, which is why we’re looking at history’s worst Buzzfeed questionnaire, designed to extract truth from the dastardly deceptive fetishists. Except, the scoring is interesting, because some questions consider being younger as gayer.
Remembering the Benjamin scale reveals the agenda here. The “classic”, “true” transsexual with Real Actual Gender Dysphoria is supposed to realize and come to terms with her gender identity early in life, never display attraction to women, and never annoy the people in charge of approving her for surgery. The paper’s author is trying to prove that “homosexual” trans women are all younger than the filthy AGPs by handing out extra Gay Points to younger respondents. As Peterson puts it:
“What [the author] reports as a correlation between sexual orientation and age is just a correlation between age and age.”
That’s just one question; the quiz gets worse, with more confounding variables that don’t measure what the paper insists they measure.
The Concept of Autogynephilia and the Typology of Male Gender Dysphoria (1989)
Last but by no means least asinine, we have another questionnaire: “Are you a cross-dressing fetishist?” This one is so straightforwardly nonsensical it’s actually remarkable that multiple people have, over the course of history, considered it to be scholarship. That is because the subjects who were given this questionnaire are described as follows:
“The online database of the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry’s Research Section of Behavioural Sexology includes questionnaire data on 2700 male patients who have presented either at that department or at the Institute’s Gender Identity Clinic since September 1980 …” [Emphasis Peterson’s.]
So this survey was administered to a group that was comprised of a mix of self-identified cross-dressing fetishists who did not express a desire to transition and went to the sexology research wing, and transsexual women who reported to the GIC and weren’t exclusively attracted to men. The paper then reported that it found cross-dressing fetishists in the sample.
You don’t say.
Peterson put it best in an August 18, 2023 tweet on the topic: “You are at the gender clinic. And the paraphilia clinic. You are at the combination gender and paraphilia clinic. Which you run.”
The Psychiatric Witch Trials
Everything about the academic consensus on transsexual women is funny and ridiculous until you remember that it’s taken seriously.
A recurrent theme in scholarship that is about trans women, dissecting us and putting us under the microscope like germs to study and contain, is the presumption of guilt. We’re always guilty of something—being born liars, deceiving the poor innocent doctors who control our access to the healthcare we need to live, doing underage sex work for fun, or worst of all, being attracted to women. The rationale for libeling us is generated post factum, vomited out by bilious obsessives held to lower academic standards than tenured faculty with a dozen allegations.
Sandy Stone’s Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto highlights this antagonism between trans women and the ones who have always treated us like specimens while claiming to be our saviors. How the contradiction between the fact that you must pass RLE in order to get the hormones you need to be able to pass RLE meant that many transsexual women were acquiring hormones through other means, only going to clinics to engage in the theater of passing their arbitrary criteria for surgery letters. Or how the discovery that trans women were handing each other copies of Harry Benjamin’s criteria for diagnosis—because of fucking course we were—inspired such rage and hatred and fury among psychiatrists appalled at the thought that we would study up to answer their absurd, irrelevant, fucked-up questions about how we jack off.
You know, the level of power clinicians held over desperate, marginalized patients who would say whatever they had to for permission to get a vagina—largely male clinicians who would often approve patients based on how fuckable they were judged to be—implies a sordid history I don’t think I need to elaborate further.
Because that’s always been our purpose—to take it. To withstand all the violence, sexual and brutal and epistemological, that generations upon generations of pathetic, depraved men have inflicted on us, and then turn around so self-identified “feminists” can spit the word “Rapist!” in our faces. Because the books about us that dare to not spit on our name are burned by patriarchal and fascist cronies while the libraries are filled with rivers of garbage inscribed into rags by ersatz intellectuals justifying why it’s okay to torture us until someone puts us out of our misery, or we do it our damn selves.
Because what such men cannot, can never bring themselves to face, is how weak and worthless and without value they truly are, how they have constructed for themselves identities predicated on exercising whatever petty scraps of tyranny they are gifted under violent regimes, endlessly screaming and railing and crying at the simple truth that I had the chance to be like you and I threw it away because YOU. ARE. NOTHING.
Because no matter how many of man’s sins are crammed down my throat I will always vomit up every last one and spit out the truth through bloodstained teeth that humanity’s original sin was never defying a petty, cruel, indifferent god, but bowing down to him.
And for as long as I and my sisters still have tongues to speak, we will shout to the heavens and remind them of their eternal shame.
Part Two: Stained With The Blood of Children
A Long, Long Time Ago
Pop quiz: How do you get a broadly liberal, increasingly tolerant public to rapidly reverse course and revive decades-old homophobic tropes in service of an anti-LGBT agenda?
It’s actually quite simple. Just sidle up and ask them, “Sure, buddy, you’re cool with the transgenders… but what if they make your kid one?”
The 2010s were an aeon ago. Both the ‘Transgender Tipping Point’ in 2014 and the legalization of gay marriage in the United States in 2015 pointed to a world that was on the cusp of widespread queer acceptance. Corporations had pride events and merchandise, media representation was diversifying, and the high-profile conservative interests whose attempts to thwart gay marriage had been foiled were left adrift. They were in search of a new target, a new cause to rally behind, a new wedge issue that could establish a foothold for re-introducing patriarchal politics into the mainstream.
A global transphobic moral panic was not inevitable. The very first “bathroom bill” in the United States—legislation that seeks to ban trans people from using the bathrooms designated as for our gender—passed in North Carolina in 2016. The opposition to it was swift, widespread, and severe. North Carolina saw many boycotts, including from corporations like PayPal, which cancelled a planned expansion of its offices, associating the bill with steep statewide economic costs. Even the NCAA—an athletic organization that in 2025 banned trans women from competing in women’s sports—relocated its championships outside of North Carolina to protest the bill. The Republican governor who passed it into law lost his next race. Florida’s current Republican Governor Ron Desantis said at a 2018 Florida GOP forum that “getting into the bathroom wars” would be a waste of time.
Complex sociopolitical phenomena have many causes, but it is possible to track what changed in a scant few years. A massive organized effort to rewrite the terms of trans discourses played into existing societal cissexism to radicalize not just everyday people but influential media figures, politicians, and authors of wizard kidlit. Trans people were vilified, villainized, and targeted on a scale that we could not hope to match—but even then, the storm could have been weathered if not one crucial issue.
We were abandoned.
Rapid Onset Transphobia
In August 2018, a paper was published in the journal PLOS One, arguing for the existence of a “new gender dysphoria subtype”, dubbed “rapid-onset gender dysphoria, or ROGD”. Months after publication, in 2019, PLOS One issued a large correction about various aspects of the study, its methods, and its conclusions.
The paper was not, in fact, establishing a new diagnosis, and as of time of writing in 2026, “ROGD” remains little more than an acronym. That is because the 2018 paper is in fact a survey of parents of children with gender dysphoria, who believe that their children’s trans identities are the result of mental health issues, social media exposure and peer pressure. These parents were largely recruited from online anti-trans forums—the websites names are “4thwavenow”, “transgendertrend”, and “youthtranscriticalprofessionals”.
Anyone who is even slightly familiar with the experience of growing up queer would be able to tell you about what it’s like: how parents refuse to acknowledge your identity, insist that queerness must be the result of trauma or outside influences manipulating their child into a “fad”. My colleague Emma Zakharuk has detailed her experiences as a survivor of childhood conversion therapy in her essay In Defence of a Phase. Parents’ attempts to beat the queerness out of their kids are highly abusive, violent, and traumatic, centering as much around social isolation and enforcing “correct” gendered behavior as they do on punishment and denial. Talking to parents of trans children who are already conferring with each other on “trans-critical” websites would hardly constitute a reliable or unbiased view of how rapidly a child’s gender dysphoria manifested, especially given how commonly queer children are abused even prior to coming out, what the parents’ clear motives are, and how abused kids find it difficult to trust or confide in their caretakers.
But of course, none of that mattered.
A corrected paper with glaring methodological flaws is still one that was published. And because no one actually reads papers, the existence of one in a prominent journal is more than enough for reactionary and propagandistic purposes. The acronym “ROGD” was promoted as a legitimate scientific theory on platforms such as ex-Fox News host Megyn Kelly’s podcast. Irreversible Damage by Abigail Shrier—whose background is in philosophy—heavily endorses the “ROGD” acronym and narrative. It has been widely cited in many anti-trans bills introduced in US legislatures since 2020—including in Florida, under the Governorship of Ron DeSantis.
As we have already seen with The Transsexual Empire, the ‘autogynephilia evidence base’, and other “scholarship” on trans people and trans issues, veracity and research ethics always take a backseat to narrative. The judgment precedes the trial, and the accusations of cis society against trans people are usually taken as sufficient evidence. Even in the current age of modern ‘skepticism’, where conservative people will insist on “doing your own research” or “not blindly trusting experts” on matters such as epidemiology or food safety, when Dr. Sexperv endorses the idea that trans people must be tortured into gender-conformity, the same people suddenly have unshakeable faith in scientific institutions!
Irreversible Damage in particular clearly lays out the patriarchal logic at the heart of the anti-trans moral panic. The focus is maintained on trans youth and specifically transmasculine youth, who are rhetorically regendered as “confused little girls”. Much ado is made about their reproductive and sexual potential, with a heavy focus on their (extant or potential) gestational capacity, ‘female’ bodies, and the removal of breast tissue that is common for transmasculine people pursuing transition. There is some nodding to misogyny, distress at being sexualized, and other feminist-sounding rationale to try and explain why “young girls” may experience discomfort with their “natural puberty”. The actual difficulty of obtaining medical approval for transition is vastly understated, and transition itself is characterized as mutilation, as ‘mad science’ with little evidentiary backing that is too new and too controversial to be best practice.
The natalist and cissexist nature of the arguments are clear. Shrier raises up pharmaceutical specters and plays on parental discomfort to provide them with abuser rationale, narrating stories of trans “youth” who are no longer minors—otherwise known as “adults”—who cut off their parents and transition—despite everything parents have done for those ungrateful wretches! Transition is billed as a fashionable trend, an experimental and life-ruining medical intervention that has to be avoided at all costs, and parents who allow it are cast as the real abusive ones, for letting their perfectly cisgender children down and letting them make a life-ruining mistake. The book speaks in clear transactional language, discussing everything children owe our parents: money, grandchildren, and a ‘normal’ family life that has no room in it for queerness.
Of course, while the focus is on the violent regendering of transmasculine youth into the future wombs of the Family and Nation, Irreversible Damage by no means forgets or omits trans women:
“In May 2019 I got a call from a friend who had just taken her thirteen-year-old daughter for a first bra fitting at Nordstrom. It went badly, my friend said, and my mind leapt to the typical reasons … But it turned out that the problem had come in a slightly different package: six feet tall, pancake makeup blurring a stubbled jaw, two breasts grafted onto a muscular torso like add-ons. Weeks later I headed to the Nordstrom to confirm my friend’s story. The employee was elegant, attentive and professional, fluttering around the floor in a tulle skirt, pink manicured nails trailing her every gesture like streamers. But there was no mistaking that this lingerie specialist was male.” [Emphasis mine.]
It is interesting how even in the attempt to manufacture a moral panic against transition, Shrier concedes in the middle of her transmisogynistic tirade that the employee was “attentive and professional”. Her crime, then, wasn’t acting in a way that is inappropriate for an attendant, but simply daring to be trans around cis women. Shrier alleges that her friend kept asking what would have happened had she not been there and sent her daughter to the store alone, implying based on nothing that the employee presented a unique sexual threat to her young daughter.
Judgment before trial or evidence, as always.
Shrier, in fact, claims that “young girls” who transition are practically compelled into it: “Young women are intruded on by biological men in locker rooms, trounced by biological boys on sports teams, and told work life will never offer them fair rewards. Intersectional language denies all their biological specialness. Hollywood—no longer in the rom-com business—offers them no fantasy on which to hang their girlish hopes. The gifts and presumptions of this culture make it hard to imagine why anyone should want to be a girl.” [Emphasis mine.]
When she puts it like that, I understand the issue. I realize now that I must apologize to all the little cis girls of the world for setting a standard of womanhood they can never live up to. It just comes naturally to me.
The language employed here is very telling. Shrier has a bone to pick with ‘intersectionality’ that has not quite been replicated in wider anti-trans propaganda, but Crenshaw’s theory serves as a synecdoche for feminism as a whole. Girls are no longer affirmed in their biological specialness, and rather than romanticizing their ability to give birth, ‘Hollywood’ and a putatively feminist culture lets them down and shatters their “girlish hopes” by making them aware of societal misogyny. Whatever her pretenses to expertise on issues of transition, there is no attempt to mask this heterofatalism: to be a girl is to make your peace with what womanhood entails, and how dare feminists try to corrupt that.
This trend of transmasculine people being infantilized and regendered as “young girls” while transfeminine people are recast as “biological men”, always spoken of as an invasive sexual and physical threat to “women and girls”, makes it very clear who Shrier and others blame for the “transgender trend”. Trans women are always spoken of as adults, deviants and perverts accused of grooming these “young girls” for unspeakably nefarious purposes. Regendering and transmisogyny here work in tandem to render trans existence as a whole into a conservative libidinal fantasy that justifies abuse and torture on one hand, and brutal violence and expulsion on the other. After all, who in their right mind would defend or stand up for a group of people grooming and preying on young children?
Who aren’t affluent and powerful cis men, I mean.
Fundamentally, the trans panic is driven by patriarchal anxieties around the reproduction of heterosexuality. The language of manipulation and deviance and disgust is laundered—barely—through pseudoscientific terms and resuscitated queerphobic tropes, propped up by the discomfort of putative allies and the refusal to question the supposed scientific basis of anti-trans legislation. This happens even when the scientific consensus does question transphobic propaganda—a 2021 statement by the Coalition for the Advancement and Application of Psychological Science, signed by dozens of organizations, plainly states that “There are no sound studies of ROGD”.
Because the point isn’t to prove anything definitively. The point is to have and prolong the debate, no matter how unsound the basis, and use the very existence of a debate to delegitimize trans existence and erode any and all protections for transgender people in legislation.
Unsettling Science
The Cass Review is a widely-criticized and heavily-disputed 2024 report authored by Dr. Hilary Cass that employs all the hallmarks of pathologizing transgender healthcare. It states that the “evidence base” supporting the use of puberty blockers or hormone therapy “had already shown to be weak”, and recommends that young trans people should only be given access to these treatments if they agree to be enrolled into a long-term clinical study, the details of which are yet to determined.
Claiming a weak evidence base to coerce trans people into a clinical study is so thickly ironic that I can practically taste blood, but the most interesting thing about this claim is that Cass disregarded practically all existing research into the long-term effects of transition treatments. Only two out of 103 UK studies were considered admissible, and no international studies were considered acceptable either. The rationale provided for these dismissals is largely that the studies are not blind studies and do not include a control group—that is, a group who are not provided the care they are seeking—which many have pointed out would be a fucking monstrous and also unethical thing to subject young trans people to!
But you’ve already spotted the pattern by now.
Following the Cass Review, NHS England and Wes Streeting bandied it about as cause enough to make the ban on puberty blockers for trans youth indefinite. NHS England also cited the report as a reason to initiate a review of clinics providing transition care to adults, despite such clinics or adults not being the subject of the Cass Review. Every piece of evidence that transition care helps trans people was determined worthless, and Cass herself responded to advocates for youth transition services who spoke of the effects of this ban on the mental and physical wellbeing of trans children—a group which included parents who have lost their trans children to suicide—by calling them “shroud-wavers”.
How gauche of us to mention the social murder of children by unsubstantiated anti-trans policies.
Janice Raymond was calling transition care “new” and “untested” and “mutilation” in 1979. Transition is always too new and too untested and never “settled science” because influential people grossed out by icky trannies and invested in cissexist norms do not want to listen to any evidence or testimony that contradicts their desire to ban transition care. The flimsiest excuses will always be propped up and advocacy by and for trans people always dismissed because this is a debate that is not about scientific consensus, but about manufacturing consensus for the outlawing of transition and the wide-scale suppression of trans people.
And I would be happy to pin the blame entirely on an epistemicidal media climate and rogue medical experts and politicians, but that wouldn’t be entirely accurate, would it? Because the debate is useful to people without political power, too. Because so many parents and siblings and family members and partners and friends and comrades and justice-minded feminists and activists and fellow queers and even staunch anti-capitalist revolutionaries found it convenient to mask their discomfort, disgust, and dehumanization of us by reaching for the nearest article or podcast or press statement on “the debate” and saying that yeah, aren’t there doubts? Should we really be letting big, hulking males into women’s bathrooms and prisons and sports? Shouldn’t there be more research? Science isn’t settled, after all.
Anti-trans policies and campaigns continue to be largely unpopular, if for no other reason than people beginning to notice that transphobic screeds are correlated with harmful policy positions. But there was enough doubt, enough of an unwillingness to fight for a “tiny, insignificant minority” whose vilification and scapegoating dominated the media’s new cycles for years, enough complicity to ensure that things would keep getting worse for us. That we would have to flee states or countries, secure our access to healthcare, contend with unchecked exclusion and employment and housing discrimination, and beg for scraps on the fringes of society more or less on our own.
Many cis people support us. I know that better than anyone, and I know that the media’s amplification of anti-trans sentiment and hate speech is not as reflective of societal attitudes as reactionaries would like us to believe.
But it was enough, wasn’t it?
Conclusion: The Penis Mightier Than The Sword
In the July 2025 volume of Discrimination Law Association Briefings, legal researcher Jess O’Thomson and barrister Oscar Davies wrote an article entitled A third sex: returning to an intermediate zone. The UK Supreme Court had, in April, issued a ruling that the definition of ‘sex’ in the Equality Act 2010 should be interpreted as ‘biological sex’.
I would provide the definition of ‘biological’ sex used here, but the SC ruling deemed that one was not necessary! Endocrinal sex, perceived sex, sex based on genital configuration—no particular ‘biological’ aspect of sex was specified, as ‘biological sex’ was held to be a self-evident term. Despite the supposed clarity and self-evident nature of the very basis of the ruling, however, O’Thomson and Davies observed that the conclusions the court drew were incompatible with the European Convention on Human Rights and placed trans people into a legal “intermediate zone” that effectively renders us all a third sex.
One such example was provided by the SC’s ruling itself. In paragraph 221, the SC held that a trans man could be excluded from men’s spaces on account of being “female”, but also could be excluded from women’s spaces if he were sufficiently virilized, on account of his “masculine appearance”. A broad reading of this ruling effectively means that trans people would lose access a plethora of services and protections, reduced to navigating a legal limbo, effectively rendered illegible by a legal opinion that stops barely short of outright stating that trans people can be treated as whatever sex is most convenient for those who want to exclude them.
Now, it must be said that despite the inconsistencies and contradictions riddling the SC ruling, it did not ultimately hold that those who operate single-sex spaces or services must exclude trans people.
But…
2025 was a year riddled with such legal and policy assaults on trans people’s rights and dignity. United States v. Skrmetti held that banning puberty blockers and hormone treatments for trans—but not cis—youth was not sex discrimination and that trans people did not constitute a “suspect class”—that is, a class of people likely to face discrimination. The Trump administration’s HHS report on gender dysphoria cited the UK Cass Review to declare that transition care is “experimental” and lacks clear evidence of any benefits. Across the West, anti-trans interests and experts and policymakers collaborated and reinforced each other’s escalated attempts at epistemic violence to an unprecedented degree.
Portuguese sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos coined the term ‘epistemicide’ in 1998 to describe the colonial process of erasing and destroying indigenous and non-Western epistemologies, to annihilate entire cultures and ways of being. In the same year, British philosopher Miranda Fricker coined ‘epistemic injustice’ to talk about how the marginalized are seen as less credible sources on their own experiences and marginalization than their oppressors. Various axes and manifestations of such epistemic violence have always been core to patriarchal society, as evident in the denial of education to girls, the under-funding of research into women’s health, the prevalence of medical misogyny, and both the reputation and recuperation of feminist epistemologies.
However, what is being done to trans people as a whole and trans women in particular seems to almost be a step beyond that. It seems less that trans women are seen to “lack credibility” and more that we are not considered a group that can meaningfully contribute any perspective at all. We are curiosities and freaks and wretches, looked upon with either pity or disgust, who must be studied by brave truth-tellers and discerning scholars who can cut off our access to resources, subject us to treatments without consent and design arcane rituals to divine the truth from our meaningless babbling. To lie about and misinterpret the words and actions and behaviors of trans women even when reproducing them in full, even when the meaning of the words is clear, and to have the least charitable and most objectifying, degrading, and bad-faith interpretations accepted uncritically is more than mere erasure or testimonial injustice or silencing.
It is epistemic vandalism. It is the refusal to consider any knowledge base or testimony or advocacy or opinion that is insufficiently transphobic as valid at all. It is the active and malicious exclusion of even the credible and authoritative if their judgment of us is deemed to be insufficiently harmful. It is the mandating and requirement that only that which actively denies, displaces, and dismisses us is acceptable as knowledge, and everything else is ‘opinion’ or ‘activism’ or, bluntly, hysteria. It is, in short, the collective global and societal gaslighting of an entire category of person, because to consider us as anything less than a tumor to excise or a blight to cure is in and of itself disqualifying. It is a reversal of reality, an inversion of who victim and oppressor are to justify a level of violence and stigmatization and exclusion as to be tantamount to genocide.
But it’s not going to be enough.
Because we’re not a disease.
We’re the cure, you sick, sick fucks.
Epilogue: “Madwoman”
I can’t wrap my head around how many of us have been silenced and strangled and tossed away to rot in the gutter.
I don’t mean this year, or even this century, even though the days of remembrance and the stories of friends lost and the grief of being unable to mourn those whose names we’ll never even know is more than enough, more than it takes, too much, it’s too much and far past what it takes to drive a woman mad. Hysterical and babbling and blinded by tears that will never cease.
You can’t even imagine it. There isn’t enough space in your head. How many girls, dating back centuries, have been tossed out onto the streets and beaten and starved and worse for the crime of being girls? How many people? How many brothers and sisters and siblings?
How many ancestors whose stories were seen inscribed in filth and washed away, along with the blood, to make your beautiful cities sparkle?
We are lives extinguished, embers that were never allowed to blaze, to scream to life in roaring radiance. We are ash and dust, we are the dirt and the worms underneath, the rot and carcass seeping through your sewers because it is only by burying us that you feel clean. Because only by sweeping us under the flagstones, crushing us under the foundations, can you continue to live with yourselves and believe in the lie that we are the ones who are delusional.
But I see the truth you all refuse to.
And the fear of that truth is why our tongues must be ripped from our mouths and everything we know crushed into mulch and viscera under steel-toed boot heels. Because I was recruited into a war I never agreed to wage, made the proud citizen of a Nation whose flag I never saluted, and told to hate everything and everyone that falls outside of imaginary bounds scrawled across shifting sands.
And when my eye’s reflection betrayed that I do not see the world as I am supposed to, that I see how easy and even necessary so many crossings are, I had to be blinded, and contained, and quarantined so that the ideas I had been infected by could no longer spread.
Well. Too late for that.
We live in a very petty, cruel, malformed world. One that wants us to pay no heed to the sheer amount and level of bloodshed needed to sustain its unquenchable thirst. One ruled by false idols on paper thrones who shout and screech and demand deference to deities who deemed them better than us all, and to tithe them with sacrifices and paeans and the fruits of our harvest.
Go forth and multiply, or else.
I am tired of this world. I am tired, even, of its people, and most of all I am tired of their devotion to ideals that do not even serve them, but are clung to and dearly held because at least they hurt me more. I am tired of hearing over and over why all I deserve is destruction and death, and I am tired of pretending that after all these years of being tired I do not long for it, long to be interred in my rightful domain.
Because after all, given how much these false kings and false prophets are willing to give up and ruin and set on fire to purify the world of a stain that will never be cleansed, I don’t think I’ll be alone for long. The Scholars and Priests and Learned Men have determined that they will cling to their slivers of tyranny and mean stations and scraps of power at any cost, even if it means the end of the world, over the indignity of living in harmony with the lessers they consider beneath them.
And frankly, if your petty, cruel, malformed world has no space for us in it, then let it die too for all I care.
There’s an old poem, four thousand years old or so, about Ishtar’s descent into the underworld. She missed her husband, you see, and tried to visit him, or get him out, but found that the underworld is easier to enter than it is to leave. And so, because the goddess of fertility was trapped by the goddess of death, nothing on earth could proliferate anymore. To save Ishtar and thereby save the world—by saving sex itself—a “gender-ambiguous” individual, Asu-shu-namir, was sent to charm the goddess of death and enable Ishtar’s escape. Asu-shu-namir is referred to variously as a “eunuch”, a “male cultic prostitute”, or… a third sex.
Fascinating, isn’t it?
Even in our oldest written and historical and mythological records, everyone knew that for the world of Man to flourish, you had to banish, exploit, and consign to death those disgusting fucking trannies.
I think about this story a lot. I think about it when I see the word “deadname”, or read about how trans people who passed RLE were forced to move cities and start over with a new identity and fake history, allowed to live as who they are only on the condition that they killed their connection to everything they used to hold dear. I think about it when I see right-wingers taunt us with memes about suicide, and when I see statistics outlining how many of us are murdered, and when I recall that every one of us knows someone who’s no longer here.
It makes it a little easier, you know? Perversely. To think death is enamored with us. To think that we are locked in an eternal dance with a goddess who can’t bear to be apart from us too long. To think that whatever end I meet, no matter how sudden or early or unfortunate, no matter whether I am forgotten or remembered by a name that I hoped would die before me, I will open my eyes and behold a cruel and terrible and majestic face, awe-inspiring beyond comprehension, that will lean in and whisper, “What took you so long?”
Death is our demesne, for we are beloved of Ereshkigal.
So I sit amidst sarcophagi, holding a broken hammer beside a rusted anvil, foolishly dreaming that we can yet build something. I wanted to write fiction, you know. Stories of joy and love and triumph, to bring to life visions and dreams that women like me are so often denied. But here I lie instead, a madwoman barking at the rubble, watching her words tumble into the ruins.
Come, then. Know death like we have known it, and become familiar with its embrace. Make peace with the foreclosing of futures, the ending of possibilities, and your utter abandonment by everything you thought was meant to protect you.
You’ll get used to it.
These are my words, if anyone cares to carve them into my epitaph. Heed them or not. Perhaps you will learn, perhaps you won’t. I’ll see you at the door to hell either way, and hope that you have the courage to look me in the eye that your gods lack.