What Leftists Are Saying About Trans Extremism

Trans extremism is a new phenomenon whose rise has been fueled by another innovation, the internet. Trans extremism has exerted considerable pressure; through that pressure, it has rapidly advanced real-world gains. Indeed, short of a military invasion and occupation, it is difficult to imagine another movement advancing as quickly and changing society as thoroughly.

This movement is associated with the left, but even leftists are questioning trans extremism. Leftist questioning occurs, inter alia, in the comments sections of liberal publications. This questioning suggests that though trans extremism has successfully exerted great force, from public shaming, to economic boycotts, to intense manipulation of family members and friends, to physical violence (here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, etc.) trans extremism has, so far, been unable to win all hearts and minds, even on the left, and its days may be numbered.

Most tolerant people probably have long agreed with the following: children who exhibit the qualities most frequently associated with the sex opposite to their own, that is girls called “tomboys” and boys mocked as “sissies,” should never be bullied. Adults who choose to live as the sex opposite to their own deserve the same respect, rights, and responsibilities as any other citizen. Effeminate men and masculine women are discriminated against, as are fat women, short men, ethnic and religious minorities, and people with physical and mental handicaps. In recent years, white, Christian, American men have also been demonized in media and academia.

There is an appropriate response to hate expressed in classrooms or in boardrooms, in stand-up comedy routines or in casual conversation, in rap lyrics and in political rhetoric. That mature response is perpetual, non-violent movement toward a civil society and human dignity for everyone.

Trans extremists do not advocate for a non-violent, universally decent, dignified, and tolerant civil society. Rather, trans extremists expressly and actively reject “live and let live” in favor of revolution. Trans extremism demands, and receives, trans supremacy, an elevated status for trans ideology over and above any other. Trans extremism promotes the scapegoating and punishment of those who refuse to demonstrate their submission to ideological orthodoxy.

Trans extremists have demanded the overthrow of Western Civilization; see here and here. Influential gender theorist Judith Butler links the undermining of the understanding of sex to the revolutionary undermining of society. “The performance of drag plays upon the distinction between the anatomy of the performer and the gender that is being performed… it becomes unclear how to distinguish the real from the unreal … no political revolution is possible without a radical shift in one’s notion of the possible and the real.” Drag Queen Story Hour supporters relate drag to the overthrow of the West. “Within the historical context of the USA and Western Europe, the institutional management of gender has been used as a way of maintaining” capitalism. The goal is “to actively destabilize the normative function of schooling … This is a fundamentally different orientation than movements towards the inclusion or assimilation of LGBT people into the existing structures of school and society.”

Trans extremism is, thus, inevitably divisive. It increases, rather than reduces, hostility, suspicion, disunion, and hate. Examples are provided below.

The firing of teachers if they even accidentally refer to students by the pronouns proper to their sex, or if they otherwise refuse to use incorrect pronouns. See the fates of teachers Peter Vlaming, Tanner Cross, Richard Bugg, and Nicholas Meriwether.

The attempt at cultural and financial erasure of identified enemies, including one of the most beloved authors in history, J.K. Rowling, because she dared to say that men and women are different.

The doxing, death threats, bomb threats, and accusations of genocide against detransitioners, that is, persons who have attempted to change their sex and, then, changed their minds. “I’ve seen the level of hate really escalate to the point that any time a new detransitioner shares their story online, they get dog-piled by thousands of trans activists, bullied, ridiculed, and of course death threats,” reports Cat Cattinson, a detransitioner.

Punishing with lifetime bans from social media anyone who tweets objective truths regarding trans. In 2022, Matt Margolis received a lifetime ban from Twitter for tweeting two facts: that trans people make up less than one percent of the population, and trans people have, as medical professionals have long agreed, a disorder. In 2018, Twitter announced that it would ban anyone who used a correct pronoun to refer to a trans person.

The destruction of women’s identity, safety, and place. Women have struggled for centuries to create spaces where women can thrive in what is otherwise “a man’s world.” Men who identify as women demand, and gain, residence in shelters meant to be safe spaces for women battered by men. One such man, Tyler Porter, boasted online of harassing women in women’s shelters; see here; Porter is not alone. A women’s shelter worker reported repeated incidences of men harassing women in a women’s shelter. Jessica Yaniv, a man who identifies as a woman, demanded that female salon employees handle his genitalia. He sued women who refused to do so, alleging discrimination. He also demanded thirty times that firemen remove him from his bath.

In 2019, the Vancouver Rape Relief and Women’s Shelter, Canada’s oldest rape crisis center, was defunded because it refused to admit men who identify as women. Men, including rapists, occupy women’s prisons where they sometimes rape women inmates. Naked males freely enter public locker rooms meant for little girls. A boy dressed as a girl sexually assaulted a girl in a schoolgirls’ restroom; the girl’s father was arrested for protesting the school’s poor handling of this assault. Other assaults in bathrooms have occurred; one victim was a ten-year-old girl (here, here).

In 2020, high school girls in Connecticut were forced to surrender track and field victories, victories that might have won them college scholarships, because they were forced to compete against boys who identified as girls. In 2022, Lia Thomas, a male who identified as a female, “shattered” records in what had previously been college women’s swimming competitions.

Trans extremism demands that the word “woman” be redefined in a way that erases decades of feminists’ struggle to insist that a woman is something more than a mentally deficient, overly emotional, hyper-sexualized, ridiculous, artificial confection whose identity and worth depends entirely on her resemblance to a blow-up doll.

Dr. Elinor Burkett thoroughly explored the anti-woman, trans extremist concept of women in her June 6, 2015 New York Times essay, “What Makes a Woman?” According to trans extremism, what makes a woman, Burkett points out, is “a cleavage-boosting corset, sultry poses, thick mascara and … banter about hair and makeup.”

For decades feminists have argued that a woman can be a scholar, a naturalist, an electrician – and no less a woman. Marie Sklodowska Curie, a two-time Nobel scientist; Sacajawea, a teen mother, slave captive, and Indian guide; Harriet Tubman, a pistol-packing freer of slaves, are no less exemplars of femininity or woman identity than Marilyn Monroe. Trans extremism insists that makeup and a frivolous demeanor renders a man a woman.

Conversely, trans extremism demands that penises are female. “I one-hundred-percent want to look in the mirror and see every part of myself as a two-spirit trans woman: my moustache … my big dick, everything,” says Ganesha Gold Buffalo, a male prostitute who identifies as a woman. Isla Bryson, who raped two women, identifies as a woman. He will be sent to a women’s prison. “We now have the utterly perverse situation where a Scottish court refers to someone … using ‘her penis’ to rape two vulnerable women.”

School curricula encourage children to think that they might be boys in girls’ bodies or girls in boys’ bodies. “In Illinois’ Evanston-Skokie School District, kindergarteners read books affirming transgender conversions; in Springfield, Missouri, teacher and administrator training recommends recognizing and affirming a panoply of student gender identities. Over 4,000 schools nationwide feature ‘gender and sexuality‘ (GSA) clubs, the national organization which calls for the abolition of the American judicial system and the ‘cisgender heterosexual patriarchy.'”

Trans extremism conspires against knowledge itself. In his 2019 book The Madness of Crowds, Douglas Murray showed how Google manipulates searches. One can experience Google’s censorship by searching trans. A February 10, 2023 Google search of “Jamie Reed,” the name of a whistleblower revealing malpractice at The Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital, demonstrated Google’s suppression of taboo knowledge. Jamie Reed had just gone public with an explosive exposé. Rather than taking the searcher to that headline-making document, Google presented, first, a tweet by one Erin Reed, a minor trans activist, who claimed to “debunk” Jamie Reed’s exposé. It’s an absurdist, Kafkaesque farce: Google insists that researchers disbelieve a document that Google does not want researchers to know exists. A DuckDuckGo search performed seconds later immediately brought the researcher to Jamie Reed’s exposé.

Church figures have joined in trans extremism’s suppression of unorthodox thought. Father James Martin is a Jesuit priest, author, and editor of America magazine. Father Martin has recommended, on his Facebook page, that Catholics police others’ pronoun use. He has also posted support for the transing of children. I used to interact with Father Martin but was blocked from his Facebook page. I don’t know why; I received no notification. I suspect my questioning of trans extremism is the reason.

Catholic publications have supported the transing of children (here). An Episcopalian priest, AJ Buckley, who identifies as queer, trans, and non-binary, condemns “men” and “women” signs on church bathrooms. The phrase “brothers and sisters in Christ” is transphobic. In December, 2022, research fellow Joshua Heath, in Trinity College chapel at the University of Cambridge, preached that Jesus had a “trans body,” because of the “vaginal” wound left by the Roman spear in Jesus’ side. Activists demand that that most foundational Christian prayer, the Our Father, whose words came from Jesus himself, be transed into “Our Parent.”

Fundamental medical terminology has changed to comply with trans extremism. “Mother” is exchanged for “pregnant person.” “Vagina” becomes “front hole.” “Double mastectomy” is “top surgery.” “Breast feeding” is “chest feeding.” A black female medical student reports that “Gender-identity ideology, with the use of such terms as ‘bodies with vaginas’ in medical journals, has ‘increased bias against women by normalizing dehumanizing language and by ginning up hatred of women who assert their boundaries.'”

“Trans Ideology Is Distorting the Training of America’s Doctors” reported the Economist on January 8, 2022. Basic facts, including the higher heart attack risk for females taking testosterone, have become taboo to speak. “A 26-year-old student at a medical school in Florida who plans to become a pediatrician is shocked by what she has not been taught … ‘With other diseases and treatments we are taught about every possible side-effect,’ she says … An academic pediatrician (who did not want her name, institution or state to appear in this story) says that all medical students understand that they are expected to follow the affirmation model ‘uncritically and unquestioningly.'” There are two frightening facts in that one sentence. One is that questioning in the sciences, a discipline built on questioning, has become taboo. The second is that the pediatrician – a doctor entrusted with care for children – is afraid to be identified because of what she said.

Trans extremism trivializes the powerful, mysterious, complex miracle, the human body, and makes light of doctors’ mutilation of those bodies for cosmetic reasons alone. Physicians like Dr. Sidhbh Gallagher advertise trans surgery for young people on TikTok. She refers, jokingly, to double mastectomies as “yeet teets.”

Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy brushed off concerns about underage girls choosing mastectomies. If the girls later change their minds, Olson-Kennedy said, they can later purchase breasts. “If you want breasts at a later stage in your life, you can go and get them.” Olson-Kennedy compared an adolescent choosing surgery meant to change one’s sex to an adolescent choosing to take the SAT or Scholastic Aptitude Test. Both, to her, are equally weighty decisions appropriate to adolescents.

Whistle-blower Jamie Reed, in her February 9, 2023 exposé, revealed how Dr. Olson-Kennedy’s flippant comment plays out in real life. A girl at the Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital, “like so many of our patients, came from an unstable family, was in an uncertain living situation, and had a history of drug use … this girl was black. She was put on hormones at the center when she was around 16. When she was 18, she went in for a double mastectomy … Three months later she called the surgeon’s office to say … ‘I want my breasts back.’ … She was pregnant. Of course, she’ll never be able to breastfeed her child.”

Social media and school-wide peer pressure have trumped medical science and caused the number of children identifying as trans to skyrocket (here, here, and here.). Rather than relying on the Hippocratic oath, “First, do no harm,” and medical reality, doctors cave in to a social fad, and struggle to prioritize that fad over science. See, for example, James M. Cantor’s December 14, 2019 article “Transgender and Gender Diverse Children and Adolescents: Fact-Checking of AAP Policy,” published in Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy. Cantor concluded that “Although almost all clinics and professional associations in the world use what’s called the watchful waiting approach to helping gender diverse (GD) children, the AAP statement instead rejected that consensus, endorsing gender affirmation as the only acceptable approach. Remarkably, not only did the AAP statement fail to include any of the actual outcomes literature on such cases, but it also misrepresented the contents of its citations, which repeatedly said the very opposite of what AAP attributed to them.”

On January 19, 2023, the New England Journal of Medicine published “Psychosocial Functioning in Transgender Youth after 2 Years of Hormones,” a study that cast a negative light on the transing of children. Two of the 315 subjects receiving “gender affirmation care,” or drugs meant to change their sex, committed suicide. Males showed no improvements in “depression and anxiety” scores or “scores for life satisfaction.” Even so, researchers reported their findings as if they were positive and mainstream media participated in this charade.

On October 12, 2022, City Journal’s Chris Rufo reported on a letter the American Medical Association, the Children’s Hospital Association, and the American Academy of Pediatrics sent to Attorney General Merrick Garland. They asked Garland to “take swift action to investigate and prosecute … high profile users on social media” who disseminate “disinformation” about “gender affirming health care,” that is the drugging and surgical mutilation of children. They also asked that social media companies suppress “disinformation” on their platforms. As Rufo points out, the letter does not define the “disinformation” Garland and social media are supposed to suppress. Those criticizing trans extremism might only quote actual statements from hospitals engaged in the transing of children. Merely quoting a hospital’s own publicity materials could result in prosecution, if the letter-writers get their way.

Pediatrics, the journal of The American Academy of Pediatrics, has published widely criticized articles by Jack Turban and Jason Rafferty that were meant to support the transing of children. As covered in “A New Low,” an August 5, 2022 City Journal article, Pediatrics suppressed discussion of these articles and petitions from physicians asking for reviews of trans extremist research. Further, Pediatrics has blackballed articles that refute trans extremism. The work of Jack Turban, a prominent promoter of the transing of children, a man who makes frequent media appearances (here and here), is underwritten by Arbor and Pfizer, two pharmaceutical companies. “Both produce off-label puberty blockers that inhibit the onset of physical changes aligning with a person’s sex … Such treatment has potential long-term effects on future fertility, bone growth and density … in addition to short-term effects such as weight gain and headaches … [and] pseudotumor cerebri, or high-pressure buildup in the brain that can cause progressive and permanent loss of vision if unaddressed.” The same American Academy of Pediatrics that is now pushing the transing of children, in 2010, advised pediatricians to perform a revised version of female genital mutilation on Muslim girls living in America.

Trans extremists repeat three accusations: anyone who departs from trans extremism in however small a way is a would-be murderer, an enabler of suicide, and a participant in genocide. These histrionic, paranoid, and masochistic accusations are parroted in mainstream media. They are repeated by elected officials. Two recent incidents demonstrate this.

In New York City in 2021, two unnamed feminists distributed small stickers stating that “Transwomen are men and most have a penis.” The statement is accurate; men who identify as women are indeed still men, and most do have a penis; a 2019 study reports that perhaps only 5% of men who identify as women have undergone castration. As reported by NBC News, Simon Chartrand, a trans activist and a woman who identifies as a man, chased and screamed at the unnamed feminists. Chartrand alleged that the feminists’ objectively true statement “kills people.” Yes. Merely by speaking facts, the speaker ends human lives. Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer echoed the accusation that speaking objective truths equals acts of “violence.” “This is bigotry that inflicts pain & violence on transgender New Yorkers. We reject and condemn this hateful act,” Brewer tweeted.

NBC news, in covering this event, characterized, or approvingly quoted others as characterizing “Transwomen are men and most have a penis” as “dangerous,” “disgusting,” and “rancid” “hate speech.” NBC repeated the false narrative that there is an epidemic of murders against trans people in the United States. There is no such epidemic.

On February 15, 2023, activists published a letter to the New York Times condemning the paper’s publishing of articles exploring the transing of children. On February 21, 2023, The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC, a New York City affiliate of taxpayer-funded National Public Radio, broadcast support for the letter. The Brian Lehrer Show won a Peabody Award “For facilitating reasoned conversation about critical issues and opening it up to everyone within earshot.” Lehrer controls a microphone that reaches millions of listeners. The only voices he allowed on his program in response to a letter calling for favorable news coverage of the transing of children were themselves trans activists. One of Brian Lehrer’s guests has a partner who performs medical transitions; the speaker had a financial interest in reducing criticism of the transing of children. Lehrer announced that he would take phone calls from trans persons. He accepted no calls from anyone critical of the transing of children.

Lehrer and his guests repeated the standard accusations of trans extremists. Anyone who questions trans extremism is a right-wing Christian hater from a red state in flyover country. The Brian Lehrer Show broadcast insistence that transing children is long-established, well-supported, and uncontroversial among health care professionals, and that there are no health risks; puberty blockers have no irreversible impact on children’s bodies. If puberty blockers are stopped, “natural puberty takes its course.” Without treatment children perceived as trans will kill themselves; there is an epidemic of murders of trans persons, an epidemic caused by accurate speech. “Our pronouns matter … Every year is on track to be the most deadliest.” The Brian Lehrer Show characterized the New York Times as a right-wing newspaper driven by a homophobic agenda. The New York Times “empowers the right.”

Is anything the Brian Lehrer Show broadcast true?

Helen Joyce is a British atheist. Dave Chappelle is black and Muslim. Joey Brite is a “secular dynamic butch activist lesbian.” Dr. Deborah Soh is a Malaysian-Chinese-Canadian neuroscientist and sex columnist. Authors Abigail Shrier and Dr. Lisa Littman are Jewish. Buck Angel is a porn performer and a woman who lives as a man. Martina Navratilova is a lesbian, Czech-born, unchurched tennis star. In short, trans-critics are not all right-wing Christians in flyover country. The Brian Lehrer Show was erecting a scapegoat, an ethnic, religious, and geographic other who can be hated, blamed, and punished for any objective reality that causes trans extremists discomfort.

The suicide threat is false. Most children with gender dysphoria, as they mature, desist and accept their bodies. Conversely, a study suggests that easing access to cross-sex treatments without parental consent significantly increases suicide rates. Too, there is a statistically significant number of transitioners who end their own lives, even with the “gender affirming care” meant to save their lives. “Duchess Lois” has asked the Canadian government to euthanize him over his regret for transitioning. In 2013, Nathan Verhelst, born Nancy Verhelst, was euthanized by the Belgian government after three disappointing operations meant to change Nancy to Nathan. Los Angeles Times sportswriter Mike Penner committed suicide after transitioning. These individuals make clear how wrong it is to present transition as a safety net that prevents suicide, and how devious trans extremists are in their demonization of anyone who dares to speak objective truths about the potential drawbacks of transition.

The claim that puberty blockers have no irreversible effects is false. In fact puberty blockers do have irreversible negative effects on children’s bodies. The transing of children through surgery and chemicals comes with a host of potential side effects, including loss of bone density, incontinence, liver toxicity, numb erogenous zones, loss of libido and inability to orgasm, and early dementia.

The insistence on the time-tested, well-supported medical transing of children is a staple of trans extremism. Dr. Rachel Levine, the Biden administration’s assistant secretary for health and a man who identifies as a woman, claimed, in his February 25, 2021, testimony to the Senate, that “Transgender medicine is a very complex and nuanced field with robust research and standards of care.” Levine recommends “accelerating” the transing of “street children.” That is, poor and homeless children, according to Levine, should be given drugs and surgeries at a faster rate than wealthy children from loving homes.

Keira Bell was one of those children. She was the child of a broken home, poor, and depressed. When Bell was a teenager and in a mental health crisis, doctors transed Keira Bell through drugs and surgery. Bell, as she matured, came to deeply regret what doctors did to her young body. She sued. Senator Rand Paul invited Levine to address the Keira Bell case. Levine refused to do so, and merely robotically and callously repeated his previous reply. Senator Patty Murray rushed to Levine’s defense, calling Senator Paul’s words a “harmful misrepresentation” of truth. Murray condemned Paul’s reference to Keira Bell as disrespectful to Levine.

Levine’s and Lehrer’s insistence that the transing of children is uncontroversial is simply false. The documentary, Affirmation Generation, released in February, 2023, features several health care professionals and researchers willing, in spite of incredible pressure, to speak frankly about trans extremism. Theses health care professionals include Dr. William Malone, an endocrinologist, Dr. Julia Mason, a pediatrician, Sasha Ayad, a licensed professional counselor, PhD sociologist Michael Biggs, clinical social worker Lisa Marchiano, psychotherapist Stella O’Malley, and Stephanie Winn, a licensed marriage and family therapist. These health care professionals come from across the US and the world, and they represent different generations. They see much to protest, on a purely health care basis, in transing children. In fact some of them compare transing children to the lobotomy fad of the 1940s and 50s that did great damage to victims. Other critics of the transing of children compare it to a more recent medical scandal, the opioid crisis.

Surgically and chemically transing children is new to American medicine, and it’s impossible to have amassed definitive studies on anything so new. For example, reality television star Jazz Jennings was described by his surgeon as one of the first to receive the treatment he received to transition to female. “I was not expecting Jazz to have a complication as severe as she did have,” Dr Jess Ting confessed to television cameras. Dr. Marci Bowers, a man who identifies as a woman, and who has performed thousands of genital surgeries, said that Jennings’ genital surgery “turned out tougher than any of us imagined … In hindsight we would have never sent you home from the hospital.”

Highly paid, experienced American physicians, in front of television cameras, took a knife to a child’s genitalia for a cosmetic surgery, even though those doctors could not predict the results of that surgery. Those results of that surgery included “crazy pain” and the likelihood that Jazz Jennings will never experience an orgasm.

Jennings’ parents complained that “expectations were not met.” They were astounded that Ting and Bowers debated, during surgery, as to how to proceed. They thought that these doctors were experts following an established protocol, not winging it, with knives in their hands, cutting up their son’s genitals as cameras recorded the event for a reality TV show. “Things should happen in a more methodical way,” Jennings’ father complained. Jennings is not alone. Dr. Marci Bowers admitted “that young boys given puberty blockers and hormones probably have never experienced orgasm and likely never will.”

Blair White, a man who lives as a woman, tweets that “90 percent of the trans women I know who have had bottom surgery have major complications and who knows how many people in the remaining 10 percent just don’t want to be open about it.”

White’s anecdotal report is supported by data from the Women’s College Hospital in Ontario, Canada. Researchers analyzed the medical records of eighty patients who sought care from the clinic between three months and five years after having the operation. The study’s results: “55% of trans women who have ‘bottom surgery’ are in so much pain they need medical care years later … and up to a third struggle to use the toilet or have sex.”

On February 23, 2023, The American College of Cardiology reported that “People with gender dysphoria taking hormone replacements as part of gender affirmation therapy face a substantially increased risk of serious cardiac events, including stroke, heart attack and pulmonary embolism, according to a study presented at the American College of Cardiology’s Annual Scientific Session Together With the World Congress of Cardiology … people with gender dysphoria who had ever used hormone replacements saw nearly seven times the risk of ischemic stroke (a blockage in a vessel supplying blood to the brain), nearly six times the risk of ST elevation myocardial infarction (the most serious type of heart attack) and nearly five times the risk of pulmonary embolism (a blockage in an artery in the lung) …  Those taking hormone replacement therapy also had higher rates of substance use disorder and hypothyroidism … The current study is the largest to date examining the cardiovascular risks of gender affirmation therapy in this historically understudied population,” emphasis added.

Trans people are “historically understudied.” The Brian Lehrer broadcast’s, as well as Dr. Rachel Levine’s insistence that transing children is accepted, uncontroversial, standard medical practice is false.

Trans extremism’s rapid domination of media, medicine, education, religion, and personal relationships is achieved through Orwellian manipulation of speech. The trans extremist terms “cis,” “cisgender,” “cis man,” and “cis woman” are designed to invade and parasitize the mind. These terms advance the trans extremist insistence that a man is not a man. Rather, since men can now be women, a new word must be coined to identify a being who is not a man claiming to be a woman. The Oxford English Dictionary added “cisgender” only in 2015. Every time anyone uses the term cis, in a way that aligns with trans ideology, that person is advancing that ideology and participating in a delusion that regards objective reality as an evil, rightwing conspiracy of Red State Christians.

Another phrase, “sex assigned at birth,” advances trans extremism by insisting that health care professionals and parents arbitrarily assign a sex to a neonate. In reality, the baby’s sex is not “assigned at birth;” sex is discovered by viewing the baby’s genitalia. A February, 2023 Google search found around four hundred thousand pages using this term, and another hundred thousand using the term “gender assigned at birth.” A Google search of these terms that limited the search to the year 1995 found no hits of either phrase used that year.

Trans extremism has invented its own hate terms. Of course the word “transphobe” had to be invented, an unimaginative sibling of “homophobe” and “Islamophobe.” “TERF,” or “trans exclusionary radical feminist” took more imagination to coin. A February, 2023 Google search found approximately 80,000 pages using the phrase “trans-exclusionary radical feminist.” Limiting the Google search to 2007 found no pages using the phrase. A search of pages created in 2008 did find the phrase. Trans extremism is happening that quickly and that recently. The term TERF was not created merely to express feelings. The term TERF was coined in order to foment violent hatred against any woman who resists trans extremism. Thus men who identify as women parade – literally parade – in t-shirts printed with fake blood and the phrase “I punch TERFS.”

As recently as 2000, Sex and the City made light of men who live as women in a way that would be impossible in 2023. Samantha, a character on the show, jousts with noisy male prostitutes who awaken her from sleep. Dialogue includes the following lines: “Samantha’s friendly neighborhood pre-op, transsexual hookers. Half-man, half-woman, totally annoying … I am paying a fortune to live in a neighborhood that’s trendy by day and tranny by night. Chicks with dicks. Boobs on top. Balls down below. It’s the other white meat. The up-my-ass players.” Sex and the City, a “sex positive” series that celebrates wealthy, fashion-obsessed, sexually promiscuous women, was a favorite of liberal women and gay men, the kind of trendy people who would today clutch their pearls in horror at the exact same entertainment their demographic adored a mere twenty years ago.

One of the most Clockwork Orange aspects of trans extremism became clear in a February, 2023 controversy involving Dylan Mulvaney, an actor who self-identifies as a “girl,” and Matt Walsh, a right-wing podcaster. In March, 2022, Mulvaney announced on TikTok that he was becoming a “girl.” He is, in fact, a 26-year-old man. As part of his becoming a girl, he skips on grass in skimpy clothing and high heels, squeals, runs in fear from a dragonfly, and falls helplessly to the ground, where he writhes in terror. He begs to be rescued from the harmless insect. “Girls,” according to trans, are helpless and ridiculous. Mulvaney’s “girl” videos have received a billion views, and gotten him an invitation to the White House where he met with President Joe Biden.

If Dylan Mulvaney had posted the exact same videos, but captioned them, not as “I am a girl,” but, rather, as “I am a flamboyant gay male actor with a cross-dressing fetish,” he would have received a fraction of the attention, and zero protest. Honest self-identification is anathema to trans extremism. It is Mulvaney’s insistence that he is a “girl” that has garnered him the billion views, the White House invite, and protest from feminists. Mulvaney acts out his sexual fetish, and a misogynist mockery of girls, writes Raquel Rosario Sanchez.

In February, 2023, Mulvaney released a video proclaiming that, after surgery, he was now so hot that he could steal husbands. His dress, makeup, and hair extensions certified his status as a “girl.” In thousands of years, he said, the video will testify to how hot he is.

On February 14, 2023, Matt Walsh released a video responding to Mulvaney. Walsh said that he did not find Mulvaney attractive, and that he also did not find Mulvaney convincing as a woman. Walsh acknowledged that through his prancing, cosmetics, costumes, and surgery, Mulvaney had lost the qualities that best exemplify masculinity. Walsh said, rather, that Mulvaney appeared “weird, manufactured, and eerie … even your personality is contrived. Nothing about you rings true. Nobody buys the act. You’ll never be accepted as a woman. Even the people who pretend to accept you as a woman are only pretending because they are afraid of being lectured if they don’t or because they want to use you as a platform to virtue signal … you will never be able to have the identity you are trying to appropriate nor will you ever escape the identify you are fleeing.” As of late February, 2023, Walsh’s video has been viewed almost eighteen million times.

Walsh’s response to Mulvaney ignited controversy. This controversy flared not on the left, where one might expect it, but largely on the right. Relatively right-wing, trans-critical voices accused Walsh of being “mean.” A typical such response is here. Remarkably, those right-wingers criticizing Walsh for “meanness” acknowledged that everything he said was true.

This, then, is how far trans extremism has progressed. It has progressed so far that even saying “I do not want to have sex with a man who is attempting, through clothing, makeup, wigs, and frivolous behavior, to become a ‘girl,’ and I do not find that man convincing as a girl” is a taboo thing to say, even for many right-wingers, even though they acknowledge that those statements are true.

Trans extremism has advanced rapidly. Has it advanced permanently? Part two of this piece will address that question.

Danusha Goska is the author of God through Binoculars: A Hitchhiker at a Monastery.