The Ground Zero of trans propaganda
A backstory so sordid, no wonder it has to be censored
Someone who knows how much I like deranged internet nonsense recently gifted me a book about online extremist communities. It has everything a girl could want: low-IQ doomers, irony-fucked fapcels, and apocalyptic preppers dreaming of violently murdering Bill Gates. Pewpewpewpew!
Perfect for a relaxing read in the bath.
The book is called Going Mainstream: Why extreme ideas are spreading and what we can do about it. First published in 2023, it was rereleased in hardback in 2024 with the updated tagline How extremists are taking over.
It was written by Julia Ebner, an ultra-educated Lisa Simpson-type who has advised, consulted at, and carried out research on behalf of major institutions and NGOs on the topic of extremism. Her clients include the World Bank, the UN, and NATO, as well as organisations like the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, Oxford University’s Extremism Lab, and Quillam, which Grok says was the world’s first anti-extremism NGO.
I wasn’t at all surprised to find that, among the Pizzagaters and Elliot Roger stans, Ebner’s book includes a chapter dedicated to me and my friends, the transphobes. The clue was is in the oxymoronic title of the book itself: what kind of idea can be mainstream while at the same time being extreme? How can extremists take over society while still maintaining their extreme status?
But knowledge of human sexual dimorphism fits that paradox perfectly.
It is universally known that male and female are real categories, that we are different, and that sometimes that distinction is important. But for reasons that will hopefully become the subject of extensive study in the future, in order to be accepted in polite society these days, you must pretend to think that this is an absurd and hateful proposition.
The “extreme beliefs” of my fellow travellers in Going Mainstream include a man convinced the Queen of England was a mind-reading reptilian (a classic), as well as people who think celebrities maintain tunnels of kidnapped child sex slaves under Washington DC. Alongside these individuals is listed anyone who thought it was unfair to let a chunky transvestite called “Laurel” Hubbard compete for women’s medals in the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.
Ebner explains that “large parts of civil society have difficulty keeping up with the pace of cultural and societal change”, as if the arc of the moral universe bends naturally towards the eradication of the female sports category.
But! she also permits benevolently that “some people reading this book might not agree with trans-inclusive reforms”, delicately skirting the issue. Some folk may even “question whether it is a good idea that children should change their gender”” (skirting intensifies), and one can even “debate under which circumstances trans women should be allowed to participate in sports competitions” (thanks Julia!)
But what disagreement about “trans-inclusive reforms” could ever be made that would not be immediately labelled as transphobia? Get outta here. Even the mildest attempt to question the implications of this ideology is “phobic”, because the whole thing rests on polite but aggressively-guarded lies.
It’s like when a politician says “less heat more light” in “the trans debate”. What sort of light has ever been considered anything other than heat? It’s complete capitulation or it’s a hate crime, as many a public figure has learned the hard way.
Ebner knows deep in her shitlib soul that the reader — a presumed normal person with normal IQ — is finding out about the reality of trans demands, and is less than enthusiastic about it. But she also knows that we have been so intimidated by the constant propaganda that we have fully internalised the taboo around discussing it.
In fact, the entire chapter is example after example of how common resistance to transgender coercion actually is, on both sides of the political aisle and in every class and walk of life.
Thus gender critical opinions are schizophrenically presented as extreme but also commonplace, marginal butwidespread, hateful but understandable. What her fingers will not allow her to type out is what this analysis implies: you can be critical of genderwang, but only an extremist would go around talking about it.
Occam’s pervert
She recalls an incident of transphobia on the London underground that she personally witnessed, in which a young guy in a pink dress gives a fellow commuter the heebie-jeebies. Details are slim, but judging by the reaction of the commuter, the young man is unlikely to be just some guy with a funky dress style, and is more likely one of the thousands of British boys who are now encouraged to bring their great unscratchable, dopamine-depleting autogynephilic itch out of their pink gamer chair and into the light of their daily commute.
Some people have a highly-evolved ick for spotting sexually transgressive behaviour in men, while others just detest how these people have coerced society into going along with their own internal fantasies. Whatever the case, his fellow commuter was clearly fed up with it all.
Apropos, when the guy in the dress gets off the train after suffering some uncomfortable stares, Ebner overhears the commuter pass a comment to his companion about the scandal of males in women’s prisons. He also scoffs at the HR pronoun practices that are being introduced at his workplace.
What a fucking bigot.
But whose side does Ebner assume the reader is going to be on? Is it the guy in the splurge phase of the crossdresser kink cycle? The guy in the scratchy polyester Shein wraparound with his dick taped up his crack? The one with the greasy hair and black choker “hiding” his Madam’s Apple, the one who demands that his work colleagues make him feel better about his debilitating sissy hypno addiction?
What could explain his horrid man’s comments out loud to his companion about a scandal that we are all somehow permitted to be scandalised about but like, you know, only in private? Ebner searches for a reason for why anyone would be saying such mean things.
The simplest explanation is usually the correct one, Julia. It’s Occam’s pervert. People know, and they are getting tired of pretending they don’t.
The refusal to quietly submit to trans blackmail is what makes TERFs “extremists”. It’s why we are included in a book about people who literally think there are tunnels under the fucking Guggenheim museum where children’s adrenal glands are drained to keep Tom Hanks looking young.
We got it all wrong, though, says Ebner. We have vastly “misunderstood” gender self-ID. We don’t realise that to change your legal sex marker, you have to swear an oath. Like, a big huge oath. It’s a really really big deal because it’s an official pinky promise. She’s referring to the requirement to sign your name on a piece of paper one time, a procedure that Finland allows you to do via an app on your phone while you’re sitting on the toilet.
The problem isn’t really that we don’t understand it. It’s that we understand it all too well, but that we won’t politely shut up about it.
Anti-radicalisation expert gets radicalised
What should go without saying is that it’s Ebner herself who has been captured by radical cult. It is an utterly fringe idea that once a man puts on some high heels he ceases to be a man, as long as he declares it so. Or that male-pattern offending ceases to exist as long as: wig.
After all her talk of the need for “in-group” acceptance as a driver of cult behaviour, she’s very clearly enthralled to some establishment guru of her own.
It’s a perfect example of how trans turns normal people into, well, extremists: the crazier the ask, the more commitment required. The more contradictory the belief, the heavier the mental burden, the deeper the hole you dig yourself.
The more monotonous the mantra, the blunter the thinking, the shriller the demand, the more swivelled the eyes, the more convoluted and contradictory the “expert” analysis. The more torched your professional reputation.
How embarrassing for an anti-radicalisation researcher to publicly reveal she has been radicalised by such a weird, Jonestown-tier belief system.
This is trans extremism.
Framing the TERFs
“Going Mainstream” represents another attempt at finding a sufficiently menacing category in which to place anyone who speaks out about transgender extremism. I wrote a couple of years ago about academics’ attempt to add any rejection of the transgender belief system to a long-establish “anti-gender” grouping that includes fundamentalist Christians and fasho-nationalists.
Many arch conservatives do reject the idea of gender, but for different reasons (God stuff, mostly) but the pairing with TERFs falls apart at the slightest poking (but Kara Dansky went on Tuckerrrrrrrr!!!1!! notwithstanding).
Ebner air-drops us into a jungle of wild-eyed apopheniacs and hopes it will be enough to subliminally convince readers that we are equally bad and crazy. It’s much lazier than the “anti-gender movement” smear, because at least that framing requires some knowledge of feminist history of anti-feminist backlash. The “positionality” of anti-gender “actors” that “locates” us within “theoretical currents” of “hegemonic masculinity” and “systems of oppression” against the “subaltern” requires some Thinking.
Ebner seems to hope that the physical proximity to flat-earthers, Andrew Tatists and January sixthers is enough to get their stench on us, without ever explaining what we have in common (apart from lots of sneaking around under pseudonyms online).
Sneaking around under pseudonyms online
Despite the mismatch in resources, it turns out that her research methodology is the same as mine: it involves a very technical espionage technique called “joining internet forums” (you wouldn’t understand, it’s too complicated).
Unlike me, however, once Ebner’s Join request has been approved by the mods on Discord, Facebook and the like, she invents elaborate personalities for her avatars that allow her to fake her way into her new friends’ hearts (an ethically dubious practice for an academic, according to journalist Simon Cottee in his excellent takedown of progressive extremism experts).
Like a wildlife photographer, I never to engage with the lumpen poasters. But that’s mostly because my interest is horny transvestites and how their needs and desires got us into the gender mess, so any attempt to engage gets dirty, quickly.
I was surprised and disappointed to find that Ebner didn’t include any dispatches from private TERF conversations in her book, like she did for all the other “extremists”. Why? Getting into a TERF WhatsApp channel would be piss-easy. Despite all the butches, we’re hardly McGyver. Ebner gets endless praise for her daring forays among the fash online; it’s her known MO. George Soros even gave her an award for it. But she makes no mention of it in the trans chapter. Nor does she interview any of us “crazies”.
An infiltration, never mind an interview, would be very welcome. All TERFs have ever wanted was for someone to shout from the rooftops what we (actually) think. The reason the counterprotests at Posie Parker’s Let Women Speak events are so noisy is because what we are saying is so utterly, painfully factual and reasonable. It’s so deeply incriminating for the trans movement, that they can’t risk anyone hearing it.
Why u no screenshot me, bitch??
Either Ebner didn’t bother to join our groups and engage with us to find out what we actually think, or she did join the groups and wasn’t satisfied with what she found (third possibility: she is still in there, takin’ notes).
Not to mention: it would take about ten seconds in any of the thousands and thousands of “trans women” forums to confirm what we’ve been saying: that these men have a crippling paraphilia. Did she do any sleuthing there?
I contacted her to ask her these questions. On her website I found a dramatic portrait of Ebner herself, staring off into the distance, no doubt having a flashback of a danger-filled mission to Telegram ‘Nam.
No response, as per.
Misrepresenting Mumsnet
The closest Ebner gets to her subject is by cherry plucking out an old post on Mumsnet. For those who don’t know, Mumsnet is a British website for mams (and Dads, one assumes) with a lively public forum feature, a virtual school gates for British and Irish women.
Mumsnet has an important place in TERF lore because women on there spoke up early and often about transvestites, leading to claims that it’s a hotbed of hate camouflaged by cupcake recipes and toddler constipation remedies.
Ebner writes: “Many parents who come to Mumsnet for knowledge, advice and support find themselves in a breeding ground for transphobia.” To back this up, she references a post from the forum from 2018 in which a man called “Mike” claims to be shocked and appalled about all the transphobia he found on the site. Mike received a avalanche of “hostile replies” to his message, says Ebner. Using the quotes from the book, I was able to find the original post she’s referring to.
Here’s the opening, which has extreme asking-for-a-friend vibes (and yes, those 1000 replies are as ruthless as you would hope):
Mike, to my trained eye, is a butthurt transvestite with a fetishistic fixation on being perceived as a regular English school-run mum. In response to his post, Ebner reports, some meanie says: “Our feminist ancestors would spit on you, you nasty misogynistic little man.”
Bad TERF!
What Ebner neglects to say, however, is that those are the words that “Mike” had directed at the women, as can be seen in his original post below. The responder was simply quoting his own words back at him.
But it turns out that this lie — or misinformation, if I’m being charitable — is just one among many. The entire transphobia chapter in “Going Mainstream” is full — and I mean full — of easily-refuted lies and crucial omissions.
All the common copypasta mythologies are in there (the 1.7% “intersex” claim, the Simone de Beauvoir “becomes a woman” quote, the exotic homophobia of “third-gender” identities, the activists’ suicide stats …ding ding ding ding ding).
At some point, for my sanity, I just had to put the book down. This is who your hallowed institutions are relying on to decrypt your beliefs.
The keystone of trans propaganda
Where Ebner’s paltering skills really shine, though, is in her conflation of trans as “all one thing”, and the elevation of the femme-presenting homosexual male as its avatar.
I keep coming back to this, but it’s so central to the transification of gay and lesbian rights (and the destruction of sex-based protections) that it needs to be repeated often: in many cultures outside the West, “gay”, as a social identity, is a foreign concept. In such places, it has long been common for feminine, same-sex attracted males to adopt a third identity, always super-specific to their own culture, that is separate from the societal roles man and woman (because just goin’ round being faggy is not an option).
A sampling, from Perplexity.ai:
These men dress up in clothes typically worn by women, and do the jobs and activities typically considered women’s stuff. In the past however many decades, they have also been able to take female hormones, and (if budget allows) get injections and/or implants of synthetic substances in various parts of the body — namely hips, chest, arse.
For lots of (ostensibly straight) men, these men’s lumps n’ bumps, in combination with and penis (this element is key) present an irresistible fetishistic appeal, and these men seek each other out for sex and/or downlow relationships.
In the lingo: shemales and chasers.
Aesthetically-feminised homosexual men represent only a tiny fraction of the population of people who identify as transgender in the Western world. But they are the keystone of trans propaganda. They are the chunky bits in the slop you get spooned by the mainstream media every time you need to be reminded not to voice any incorrect opinions on the erasure of sex in law and policy. They help obfuscate the reality of the far ghastlier types: the heterosexual cross-dressing dads, and the middle-class girls who self-mutilate out of angst and/or narcissism.
To be fair, Ebner’s transphobia chapter does include interviews with a prototypical autogynephile (Star Trek fan, shaped like a bison, wife got the squick and left) and a “seahorse dad” (a pregnant woman with a beard and autism).
However, too much focus on these latter types threatens the oppressed-n-marginalised wobbly stool upon which the entire sex deception movement is precariously perched. That’s why your journey to trans acceptance is always paved with the gritty misery of permanently “pre-op” transsexual gays — because these men are often vulnerable, poor, and subject to extreme violence. It also helps that they look slightly more passable as female than the other lumbering blokes who masquerade as women (slightly) (at least before they succumb to inevitable twink death).
Combined all together, this is the “trans community” that is presented as one big decontextualised tribe, as if a slinky Paraguayan gay would otherwise have anything to do with a straight autogynephile, who is himself repulsed by a woman who rejects feminine beauty standards and all its prettifying ornaments.
It’s hard to fathom a more mismatched trio, when you think about it. Two are direct rejections of each other, and the third is a meat-Lego amalgamation of both. Fucking weird bunch.
Anyway, as part of her effort to struggle us into acquiescing to gender authoritarianism, Ebner brings us on a field trip to a wooded parkland in the west of Paris called le Bois de Boulogne, which is the place to go if you want a cheap blowjob from an impoverished migrant.
On this particular day, there is a protest being held by Latin American male prostitutes about police inaction over murders of trans women, which are reported to occur at a rate of about one or two per year.
One of the victims, Vanessa Campos, was a Peruvian man who was killed while working in this particular zone of the Bois. Another, called Ivanna, had been killed by a couple of fellow Peruvian men in his apartment. Another Peruvian, Sasha, committed suicide.
Somehow these deaths were enough to make this corner of Paris “the number one crime scene for lethal transphobic hate attacks in Europe,” according to Ebner, who says it is the scene of multiple acts of “violent transphobia”.
There is no smoothing of the jagged transition from mild-mannered Rosie Duffield, Labour MP for Canterbury, “liking” a TERFy tweet, to the murder of an immigrant prostitute in France that happened three years earlier. Likewise, we’re left in the dark as to how JK Rowling’s righteous disgust at the dehumanising phrase “persons who menstruate” has anything to do with it. Lacking any real link, she has to rely on vibes.
So vibes is what we get.
The real story of the murder of Vanessa Campos
Paris has a healthy supply of men who lust after trans women’s very specific cobbled-together physiology. As a result, it also has a constant stream of travestis (and ladyboys, and other culture-specific girly-gays) to serve them. A lot of these Latinos come to France and overstay their visas, thus disappearing off the authorities’ radar, making them ripe for exploitation. Some of them have been trafficked, and rates of HIV among them are very high.
Suffice to say, their lives are not pretty.
According to estimates, there are between 180 -400 trans-identifying prostitutes operating at night in one specific part of the Bois de Boulogne. In 2023, about 80% of them were from Peru.
At the time that Campos was killed, he and his fellow prostitutes were being targetted by teenage Egyptian thieves, who themselves were all in the country illegally. This racketeering gang had been robbing the customers of the travestis for years, because they rightly intuited that the crimes were unlikely to be reported to the police.
This was all having a very negative effect on the travestis’ ability to make money, so they (or most likely, their proxinate) hired a big burly black guy to keep the punters safe.
One night, the bouncer got into a scuffle with one of the thieves, and he came out on top. This made the Egyptian mafia very angry. The presence of the bouncer threatened their very lucrative business, so eight of them returned to the spot with weapons and a plan to do something about him.
In a chaotic kerfuffle, Campos got shot while trying to protect one of his clients. The investigation revealed that it was not a hate crime, but rather a gang murder, carried out by impoverished teenagers. It was not even possible to prove whether the shots were fired with the intention of killing. Nevertheless, two minors got long prison sentences.
Transphobia? The investigation, and the judgement, didn’t reflect that.
Why so many gay men are “trans” prostitutes
The real reason why so many femme-presenting gay men are overrepresented in trans murder lists is never addressed, because the reason why so many of them work in prostitution is never addressed. But it’s curiously near-universal. It’s so common that the word travesti is synonymous with prostitute in much of Latin America. The same goes for a lot of the culture-specific names for “third gender” men.
Prostitution (especially street prostitution) is a dangerous trade. That there are high numbers of deaths among trans-identifying prozzies compared to the rest of the population is not in doubt(update 01/04/2025: this might actually be in doubt!) What is never presented is a per-capita comparison with the number of murders of women working the same job. So just from a dork perspective, if nothing else, you can’t validate such claims until the data have been compared.
Nevertheless, Ebner uses their murders to back up the utterly exhausted, misleading shibboleth that “black transgender people” are “the most vulnerable group” in society who experience “the highest proportion of sexual abuse” of any other group (women would like a word).
But even if they were not victims of violence, according to the rules of identity Marxism, men who claim to be women sit at the tippity top of the pity totem pole and you have to give them everything they want.
In the 2009 documentary called Trans Latina, which was funded by the WHO and UNAIDS, a group of teenage boys tell how they feminised themselves to work as prostitutes, which led to them quitting school (note how none of them claim to be women).
If you read enough AIDS research, or consume enough “public health” sponcon like TransLatina, you learn to identify the self-perpetuating cycle of misery that leads to this tragic and seemingly unavoidable life trajectory.
It goes without saying that feminine men are not a well-liked bunch in macho cultures, which is where their murders tend to occur. But they are, at the same time, so “well-liked” in macho cultures (nudge nudge wink wink) that they can make far more money on the game than any other job their culture is willing to allow them to do.
Homophobia drives them out of school, but the lure of easy money keeps them on the streets. There’s a huge demand for their “services”, and oodles of cash to be made — more than they could dream of making at a salon or, say, down at the fish processing plant. They are at their most “valuable” for sex when they are young (barf), but their feminised bodies mean they get even more harassment in school, so they drop out — sometimes at the urging of the school itself.
And so the cycle of misery begins.
Schroedinger’s prostitute
It’s an all-round sad and tragic situation, driven by (sorry lads) male sexual rapacity. The fact that their cultures have carved out this identity for them over hundreds if not thousands of years "(TRANS PEOPLE HAVE ALWAYS EXIIIIIISTED) makes it extremely hard to escape.
But selling sex also allows these men to have romantic relationships that they otherwise can’t have out in the open, and to feel “affirmed” in their femininity (not a problem for female prostitutes). The media invariably claim they are locked out of traditional work against their will and have no choice but to sell themselves. But further down the same pages, you often learn that many do it simply because they want to.
It’s easy to find examples of rich-world trans people getting into prostitution because they claim to like it. But even in the poorer parts of the world, men often say prostitution is an appealing career option and the only stigma and misery attached to it is a result of its criminalisation.
You can detect the apparent contradictions everywhere in the advocacy messaging of trans NGOs such as Acceptess-T, who were also present at Ebner’s protest in the Bois de Boulogne (and who came to scream at us during our Olympics protest in Paris, d’ailleurs).
They describe a kind of Schroedinger’s trans prostitute:
Prostitution is a terrible, inhumane, last resort means of survival. Also, it’s empowering, validating, and affirming, it comes with a supportive and fun social community, and it’s an easy way to get money for the big titties your partners like (you just have to decriminalise it to find out which one it is!)
The “lovers” of these feminised males are rarely proud or loud about their sexual preferences. It’s safe to infer that the anger of a chaser-punter, in a fit of post-nut self-disgust, is behind a lot of the murders of “trans women of colour” we are blackmailed with every year on Trans Day of Remembrance. The reported circumstances of the crimes and crime scenes certainly suggest this to be the case. The killers are very often on-again, off-again “boyfriends”, while some of them (surely disingenuously) claim the “trans panic” defence, in what they say were hook-ups-gone-wrong.
Is there a straight line between me calling Lia Thomas a man online and the tragic murder of Vanessa Campos? Oh, absolutely, Ebner suggests. It’s the inevitable outcome of all that gender-crit transphobia.
But as I have belaboured on these pages before and will belabour till the day I die, it is actually homophobia — not transphobia — that is the basis for most of the murders on the annual lists. For homophobes, the shame of shagging a man in a dress has nothing to do with the dress. It’s the fact that he’s male. If there’s any hate involved in the commission of these crimes, it seems overwhelmingly to concern hatred of same-sex attraction, whether internalised or externalised.
I repeat. Homophobia.
How travestis became transgender
Worst of all, Ebner leaves out a major, crucial detail in her context-free Parisian mise-en-scene: travestis don’t even claim to be women. The same goes for many of the men who occupy other cultures’ third gender identities.
In case it’s not clear why this is relevant, I’ll spell it out: you are being blackmailed with the tragic stories of men who don’t claim to be women in order to make you accept that “trans women are women” in sports, intimate spaces, prisons, census data etc.
Travestis, third-genders, and other femme-presenting men in the global south ultimately ended up adopting Western-style trans labels (at least when the cameras are rolling) due to a confluence of historical factors and strategic alliances.
As you can see in the screenshot below, taken from a meeting of Open Society Foundation in 2013, donors were encouraging men with culture-bound specific gender-bending identities to adopt the “born in the wrong body” origin myth, presumably as a way to expand the “stakeholder” group for advocacy purposes.
If the Philippines’ bakla and all the other third genders wanted to get their hands on donor funds, I guess they would have to go along with it. It’s the same reason why NGOs in the global south put pronouns in their bios on Zoom calls to donors, as women’s rights campaigner Maya Forstater (who famously used to work for a big development organisation) has reported.
The Stop Pathologisation campaign
This strategy played a huge part in the mainstreaming of trans in Europe in the mid aughts. In 2006 and 2007, a campaign erupted in Spanish, French and Latin American cities calling for the complete “depathologisation of trans identities” (i.e. the removal of trans as a mental disorder from WHO and ICD classification of diseases, revisions of which were due sometime in 2012-2014).
It came after the enactment of a new Spanish gender law that travestis found too closely tied to the traditional medico-psychiatric model. The law also didn’t apply to immigrants, which travestis in those cities overwhelmingly are. They had lobbied for liberalisation of the law, but this was not it.
So they took to the streets.
We are not crazy, the men claimed, in a bid to convince the authorities to do away with the stigmatising mental illness diagnosis that was required for legal gender recognition (and thus access to aesthetic treatments/insurance reimbursements). And they were not crazy. They were just effeminate men whose rent payments, love lives, and remittances to their mamitas depended on hyping up their femininity for their GAMP clients.
Also, they pleaded, don’t make us get our dicks cut off. Sex reassignment surgery, (later strategically rebranded as “forced sterilisation”) was required for legal gender recognition in most European countries at the time. That’s because both the legal system and the medical “pathway” for trans people were based on a protocol largely designed for straight autogynephilic males for whom castration and “transition” offered the only route to reducing their horny distress.
If any man wanted papers that identified him as female, for whatever reason, it was neutered or nothing. But most travestis have no interest in getting rid of their junk. Even if they personally don’t like their bodies (dysphoria among gay men is real), the clients and boyfriends certainly do.
You may have noticed that the HOT SHEMALES IN YOUR NEIGHBOURHOOD WAITING FOR YOUR CALL perpetually describe themselves as “pre-op”. This harks back to the medical model the travestis wanted to abolish. It used to mean “I’m in the middle of my transition”. Now it usually indicates: I have both boobs and a (estrogen-shrivelled) peen.
The throuple comes together
Before going global, the campaign, called STP2012, was originally founded (or co-founded) as a national campaign by a very young Spanish trans masc with a head full of Judith Butler, Miquel Missé.
She had witnessed immigrant prostitutes in French cities organising for similar demands when she attended something called the Summer Euro Mediterranean Universities of Homosexualites (???wtf???) in Marseilles, which is a kind of political camp for gays that has apparently been running every summer for decades.
As we know, it was around this period that female “trans masc” and “non-binary”-identifying women were increasingly (and increasingly, and increasingly) coming up with fun new sex identities. They had a a history of organising together with travestis in France and Spain, but barely. The two groups had zilch in common except this one thing — the desire to be able to choose their identities and (publicly-funded) body modification procedures.
The women helped add legitimacy to travestis’ claims that “forced sterilisation” was dodgy, human rights-wise, because of how unsuccessful phalloplasties are (see “sexuality and identity without scars”). They later even claimed that the requirement for females to be sterile as a condition for getting an M on their passport goes against women’s sexual and reproductive rights (hard to top the brass neck of that!)
But perhaps most importantly, the female activists, who almost universally came from a much higher socio-demographic backgrounds (like Missé) were able to contribute reams and reams of gender theory bullshit they had picked up while studying. They helped infuse the trav-butch menagerie with bananas academic wankery about “transfeminisms”, linking the travesti plight to women’s liberation in some wordy way that I’m sure is very interesting, logical and rational.
But what about the third wheel in the trans throuple: the “true transsexuals” of the classic medical model? How did they see the depathologisation campaign? Evidence suggests that they were not all eager to do away with pathologisation, and clashes between the factions had always been obvious. The conflict re-emerged at the world’s first gender identity conference, which took place in Barcelona in June 2010 (see screenshot below).
But why would anyone want to maintain the system of pathologisation — with all its surgeries, psychiatry, and stigmatising mental health labels?
It was partly cultural: trans-identifying activists in northern countries had spent decades fighting for legal changes that gave them certain rights. They were worried that a free-for-all model of “legal gender recognition by self-determination” as demanded by the STP2012 activists might not only dilute the legitimacy of their acquired identities, it might even risk losing the benefits they had gained through legislative changes.
A medical-based model presupposes access to medical “treatments”. What would happen to their right to (publicly-funded) Double-Ds if the medical framing was overtaken by a social justice one?
Another reason rich-world “transsexual” males were hesitant about self-ID is that some of them really, really, really, need to believe they have a board-certified medical condition called “gender identity disorder” because it helps explain to their wives, children, bosses, neighbours, families, but especially *to themselves* that they are a type of woman with an unusual illness, and not a type of man with an unusual fetish.
Switching to a human rights/social justice framework must have ultimately proved enticing to the transsexuals, however: while a gender identity dysphoria diagnosis grants them freedom from guilt for indulging in their compulsive kink, the human rights reframing gave them the right to go around being total pricks about it.
The fear of losing legal and medical rights was incomprehensible to the Faʻafafine of Samoa and the Metis of Nepal and all the other poor bastards of the global south who were joining the depathologisation fight, as they had no systems, protections, or access to surgery or treatments to lose.
But ultimately, during that Barcelona gender identity meeting (I‘ll be writing more on this soon), more than 700 trans activists from all over the world decided that self-ID was their collective plea going forward, and that from then on the T would represent all the identities (trans, transgender, transsexual, travesti) thereby “overcoming deep discomfort among both transvestites and transsexuals who did not like losing their identities”.
Thus straight male autogynephilic activists, scattered all the way along the spectrum from part-time cross-dresser to full-blown castrato, threw their lot in with all the travestis, third genders and trans mascs to fight the “protectionist” gatekeepers for a pathology-free legal gender recognition.
By the time the STP2012 campaign released its 2010 guideline for treatment of tran-identifying people directed at national health systems, campaigners were full-tilt pretending trans is all one thing. And this community building was not just advantageous in terms of boosting the size of their marches, but also for attracting HIV/AIDS money (via new trans-dedicated NGOs) — instead of diluting it via “cis gay” LGBTQ ones, as had previously been the case.
That same year, WPATH began to advocate for the depathologisation of trans identities too, even though, paradoxically, WPATH is/was the world’s principal trans medical gatekeeper. Alas, the WHO didn’t remove trans as a mental illness from their classification of diseases until 2022, when they shunted it in under conditions related to sexual health.
Parasitisation
Middle-class women and middle-aged autogyenephilic males may have brought organising skills, political wherewithal, and even pseudo-intellectual flimflam to the fight for “trans rights”, but it was the exotic, culturally-relativised “trans women” who provided (and still provide) the genuine claims of marginalisation and the bulk of funding via donations for HIV/AIDS programmes.
You might have noticed that the Barcelona gender identity conference referenced above was sponsored by the foreign ministries of western governments. Why? Rich-world development agencies needed to be sure that aid was getting to get to these desperate “trans women” because they are about 49 times more likely to have HIV than other adults. Activists parasitised these men’s misery and donors’ urgency, happily reframing a global public health emergency as a civil rights cause to redirect compassion, concessions — and importantly, cash — to themselves.
In doing so, they have reinforced and legitimised all that fun, colourful, tropical homophobia.
This parasitisation was necessary because there is nothing urgent about validating the customised sexual identities of well-off women with megaphones and degrees in PoMo bullshit. Nor was there much sympathy for the masochistic IT engineer who can only achieve orgasm if he is wearing a silicone pregnancy belly from Temu.
They are not oppressed, marginalised trans people of the slogans. But the guys in the Bois de Boulogne certainly are.
The activists made sure to include poor-world gays and their tragic tales in all their advocacy and communications materials, schlepping them along to UN, EU, WHO, APA, IACHR, Council of Europe etc. meetings, pushing them in front of panels of suits in Geneva, Strasbourg, and Brussels and saying “See? We’ve always existed! We are extremely marginalised, vulnerable, stunning, brave, at risk of violence….”
The Council of Europe, a supranational human rights system that has a weird track record on deciding what human rights means, was heavily targeted by trans activists during this period. Conveniently, Turkey, a conservative country with a solid, centuries-old legacy of treating feminine men like dirt, is one of its members.
That meant that European activists were able to shamelessly instrumentalise the plight of genuinely shat-upon Turkish men to enshrine the opposite sex delusions of all of the people in the new “transgender” taxonomy as a European human rights standard. They claimed, without any evidence, that replacing the M for an F on the passports of the hundreds of men in dresses hanging out of the windows in Istanbul’s back streets was the only way to make their lives better.
Perhaps the most widely-publicised tragedy milked by the activists was that of Gisberta Salce, a Brazilian, homeless, HIV-positive travesti prostitute who was horrifically tortured and murdered in 2006 by a gang of psychotic teenagers in his adopted home of Porto, Portugal.
In 2009, the Commissioner for Human Rights cited Salce (and the Turks) when he reprimanded all 47 member countries for not falsifying the legal documents of our homegrown transvestites (and female Tumblr teenagers desperately to escape womanhood, a contagion that had just started to emerge).
My home country, Ireland, has no third gender culture (our gays either just hid it or joined the priesthood). Our only mediatisable trans sob story was a cartoonishly aggrieved castration fetishist called Donal Foy, a heterosexual dentist who upended his poor wife and daughters’ lives by going full-time with his kink. Irish activists had been putting their backs out trying to make him out to be a sympathetic figure — an Irish Gisberta Salce or Vanessa Campos.
But ultimately, due to our membership in the Council of Europe and all the other heavily-lobbied international legal and human rights systems, it didn’t really matter that Foy was a dud in terms of his emotional appeal. Strasbourg, sold on the idea of trans violence, ordered us to officialise Foy as female. So we did it.
Personally, I think all that money and energy would have been better spent on figuring out how to make sure effeminate and same-sex attracted men are accepted as they are, rather than forcing them to pretend they are women just so European and American narcissists can get their speshul identities validated.
I think you will probably agree that it’s deeply shitty to exploit their misery in order to blackmail society into accepting a demand with such astronomical consequences as denying the sex binary. Knowing that, as a by-product, you’re reinforcing homophobia in the world’s most repressive places?
What a sordid, sordid history.
The annual murder list torture
Don’t worry — those poor femboys were not discarded once self-ID became legal human rights precedent in the West. They still get trotted out every year in the murder lists so that the mainstream media can use them to beat you over the head about your latent transphobia.
One of these lists is the Human Rights Campaign’s annual American trans murder roundup, which is included in Julia Ebner’s book as backup for her hate crimes claims. The list includes the murders of people who claimed to be trans but it also people who didn’t claim to be trans — but that HRC posthumously decided were gender non-conforming.
Is there anything more sexist than a trans rights activist? I don’t think so.
As expected, the list contains a lot of gay black men and drag queens in poor communities who were killed by domestic partners and clients. But it’s also got robberies-gone-wrong in which the deaths of quirkily dressed people were clearly collateral damage, as well as a whole bunch of deaths for which no cause was ever found.
The most sinister, downright disgusting instrumentalisation of of tragedy in this list, however, and I cannot emphasise how vile this is, is that of two teenagers called Jasmine Cannady and JJ Bright.
Jasmine and JJ were two American children who, at the time of their murders, were claiming to be trans man (JJ) and non-binary (Jasmine). Their mother was an army veteran who suffered from bipolar disorder “with psychotic features”. At the time of their killings, she was suffering from paranoid delusions that someone was going to take her children away. I think you can see where this one is going.
One day she told the girls’ father cryptically “God wants you to forgive me”. She then shot both her children in the head. The prosecution wanted the death penalty, but they knew they might not get it on the basis of Bright’s “diminished capacity”. Going through Bright’s Facebook pages, as well as those of her children, I saw photos of mom and her kids, sometimes in a loving embrace, sometimes accompanied by messages like “love you mommy”.
There is also a photo of the sickly pink and blue of the trans cult flag and the message “trans ally” emblazoned across mom’s chest.
If you find that sad to read, I’ll let you imagine how sad it was to trawl through it in the search for any evidence to back up Ebner’s claim that this woman killed her children because she hates trans people.
There is a lot of treacly, empty, meaningless rubbish that has been layered on the fake trans rights story over the years by the Borg, but this type of propaganda is straight up immoral. Anyone who engages in it should be ashamed of themselves.
True but toxic
Julia Ebner’s propaganda wouldn’t really matter, of course, except that she’s a prolific rent-an-expert on the anti-extremism beat, a growing retail industry that has emerged to meet the establishment’s need to sanitise online censorship.
Extremism research emerged after 9/11 when both Islamist terrorism and the internet became part of our daily lives. As life moved online, loners with radical leanings found each other and compounded the craziness they had nurtured in isolation. A market for diagnosing their derangements naturally followed, as institutions sought experts who could help predict and prevent atrocities.
But the algal bloom of self-styled analysts that has emerged in the two decades since has been branching out, as Liam Duffy noted in Unherd. The job has gone from tracking radical beardo preachers and unhinged Wyoming survivalists to sorting all your tweets, memes, rants, jokes, roasts and shitposts into disinformation (making stuff up), misinformation (getting stuff wrong) and hate speech (YMMV).
Incitement is already illegal, but the task set for the experts is to make the case that some words that do not constitute incitement — including those state true facts, like the reality of trans extremism — can lead to harm and therefore, should be scrubbed.
It’s a new approach that the British media regulator Ofcom love because it “centres the conversation around harm while avoiding debates over truth.”
Saying that a woman is an adult human female, that most men who claim to be women are sexually aroused by doing so, that homophobia is the reason why the trans movement was so successful, and that female chubsters are stealthing unsuccessfully as bears in gay saunas (lol) …. all of it could lead to more murders of Latin American immigrants in the outskirts of Paris. Or so say the experts.
As the truth of the trans movement emerges, new terms are deployed: “problematic attitudes”, “harmful”, “legal but harmful”, “hate-adjacent”, “borderline”, “derogatory”. Truths are relabelled “adversarial narratives” so the authorities can massage a bit more mileage out of the definition of hate speech.
By claiming speech is verifiably true but nevertheless creates a “toxic environment”, it is easy to disappear ugly facts. By sprinkling it with #humanrights language, linking it to specific protected identity groups, and then rejigging the interpretation of existing hate crime/hate speech laws, institutions have invented a rock-solid alibi for censoring any truth that they don’t like.
Ebner’s book, with all its lies and obfuscations, adds to the citable canon on the tweets-to-atrocities pipeline. I agree. The truth about trans is extreme. But it’s not the messengers who are the extremists.
That was an amazing essay. Your wordsmithing with comments such as "As if the arc of the moral universe bends naturally towards the eradication of the female sports category" nails the target to a cross. As a woman, I know my purpose in life is not to be part of a treatment plan for deranged males, and their transmaidens can go crawl back in their holes and pack sand. Going with a paid subscription tomorrow on payday.
Fantastic essay, I will restack it. The point of trashing the TERFs is for the author to remain allowed to publish. Imagine you're an 'expert' on extremists but fail to take the socially correct position on the most conspicuous extremists: the Foucault fan club.