A note: We are in 2025, and sociobiology and ethology, and other biological disciplines have identified for decades male (and female) animals who hide their sex in order to avoid male aggression, and for males, to gain entrance to female enclaves for sex.
There is no puzzle, no Jan Morris “Conundrum”, no “phenomenon”other than widely observed animal sex mimicry occurring compulsively in humans. (Humans are in general instinctive mimics - from birth!)
Empirically, humans exhibit the behavior of sex mimicry for the same reasons other animals do - to avoid male aggression (“trans” die of violent assault at half the rates of other men), and to gain access to female enclaves (gyms, changing rooms, women’s festivals, bathrooms, etc - we’ve heard it all). Male sex mimics who commit sex crimes do so at 3x to 5x the rate of ordinary sex criminals. It evolved because it works.
One day soon psychology and medicine will catch up to the last 50-odd years of animal sociobiology. Lying, cheating, deception and stealing have been well-documented animal behaviors for a century or more, if not for millennia. It has always been clear that humans share many complex behaviors with other animals.
Once we shed peculiar 19th century views of human behavior (Freud was a treasure trove of mythology) and root our understanding in empirical, observational biology a lot of the Benjamin mythology will clear up.
As an endocrinologist who associated with doctors of that era, experimenting on people by removing testicles and ovaries, and cavorting around with charlatans, it is no surprise he was the architect of this movement. Have you read PHARMA by Gerald Posner? It has a lot of history of the pharma industry in the 20th century. Greed was at the center of it.
This is an incredibly well researched and fascinating history. Somebody should make a movie about this. Thank you for this great and thought-provoking writing!
Yeah, and the movie can have a parallel thread about all the women who, since the 1960s, due to lack of medical research and healthcare, did not receive treatment for various endocrine disorders like endometriosis, autoimmune diseases, diabetes and poly cystic ovarian syndrome. Wow! So much easier to just hand out estrogen and testosterone prescriptions!
Lots of interesting content, but not an entirely convincing form. Firstly, Benjamin's shenanigans are pretty well known to anyone interested in trans history - as your sources attest to. He's not that forgotten or neglected. As an example of how trans activists still reference him, see the latest post from the substack The One Percent. Secondly, some of your points aiming to show similarities with Benjamin are a bit of a stretch. That said, the continuing influence of his key mad ideas (split sex into bits, therapy never helps, give patients what they want, etc) absolutely deserves to be highlighted.
Judith Butler, Sonia Corrêa and other post modernist feminists are not exactly blameless. Judith Butler even wrote a chapter in a book that Susan Stryker edited in 2006 on transgendered identities.
I completely agree about Judith Butler's blame here. But as an academic feminist myself, I've found the common assumption that Butler now dominates feminist scholarship to be exaggerated, to say the least. Most feminist scholars don't engage at all with Butler. In fact, most of us research various aspects of women's lives (work, creativity, sexuality, legal rights, etc.) unburdened by the baggage of postmodern theory. Many of my like-minded colleagues think that transgenderism's challenge to the female sex category has distracted feminist scholars, especially younger ones, from our true work. Naively, I had figured back in the 90's that Butler's influence on feminist studies was just an "emperor's new clothes" trend that would fade away quickly. I regret not speaking out (until recently) against the excesses of transgender ideology over the last thirty years. During those years, I was busy teaching and writing about American women's fiction, and I found myself expecting optimistically that the Butler trend would disappear soon enough. Kathleen Stock's Material Girls (2021) and her unjust treatment in academia shook me out of that misguided optimism.
So . . . my comment was quite specifically directed at post modernist feminists like Judith Butler and Sonia Corrêa. I am not an academic feminist. I do sometimes call myself a feminist, but one big beef I have with American feminists (as opposed to Canadian feminists of the 1960s onward) is the failure of American feminists to defend maternity leave and breast feeding. That is why I sometimes do not call myself a feminist.
In important ways, academic feminism went off the rails in other ways sometime in the 1990s. It wasn't just the post modernist feminists.
I think we should stop defending feminism or academic feminism so adamantly. There really are major divergences now between the lived lives and needs of most women, on the one hand, and the ideas being advocated for among most American academic feminists, on the other.
Kathleen Stock does come close to what I think on many issues. I did read Material Girls and thought it excellent. So there is, no doubt, a place for academic feminism. But Kathleen Stock is British and grew up in Scotland. There's a strong vein of Presbyterianism in her thinking.
In the workplace and in law, the ideas of academic feminists are frequently adopted. They do impact women in the workplace outside academia.
In the last ten years or so, most of the efforts of women to address sexual harassment have been sublimated under hyper protective trans rights policies. The University of California just made it an offense to not use the preferred pronouns of a trans person. Meanwhile, that very same university system for years tolerated severe cases of sexual harassment and have never implemented a similarly severe policy against the sexual harassment of women.
So, whatever American academic feminists are doing, more recently, it doesn't seem to be translating very well into policies that protect women and girls. We're having to fight like hell to save Title IX. In California, we can't even stop prostitution of minors. Sex trafficking is rampant. There has been no improvement on the gender pay gap in ten years. In engineering (my field), even with the same degree, experience, and job classification, women, on average, are paid ten percent less than men.
I agree these issues at the University of California need to be addressed. In my experience, however, university administrators and HR officers cause these problems, not feminist professors. And, sadly, we feminist academics don't now have enough political clout on our own to enact policies to combat sex trafficking or to close the pay gap. Feminist researchers study these problems, though, and they provide data and insights to political activists dedicated to dealing with them. Doing research about the many facets of women's lives is acadmic feminists' main purpose. Some of this research creates knowledge with policy implications, of course, but I do not think feminist researchers should necessarily be responsible for establishing and enacting policy and blamed for policy makers' failures to do so. By stigmatizing all academic feminists, most of whom do not promote transgender ideology, and unfairly blaming them for instigating a destructive movement that was actually started by Harry Benjamin et al., we are in danger of cutting off our nose to spite our face.
Still, all of the women's studies departments in the universities in which I studied (Carleton University in Ottawa, Simon Fraser University and the university of British Columbia) that were hotbeds of feminist activism in the 1980s and early 1990s) have been converted to gender studies departments. As an alumni of these universities, I'm often asked to donate to these departments. I find these "gender" studies program unrecognizable. And it is not just me. Having spoken at length with the feminists such as Meghan Murphy, who studied in the women's studies department at Simon Fraser University, she confirmed to me that her department was taken over by gender activists.
It is no secret that very wealthly gender proponents have donated generously to former women's studies departments and largely or completely converted them to gender studies departments. Universities such as the University of Victoria, Simon Fraser University, the University of California at Berkeley, the University of British Columbia, Carleton University, and Stanford, to name a few, have been heavily influenced by donations from the Stryker family, the Pritzker family, Martine Rothblatt, the Weinstein Family and Robert Quartermain.
Susan Stryker: visiting speaker at the gender studies program at Stanford:
Yes, there are still feminists in gender and women's studies departments working to advance the cause of women, but to say there hasn't been big money influencing of gender studies departments that have distorted feminist voices is profoundly naive.
Yes, women's studies programs at elite universities in the US (both private universities and flagship state universities) have been, for the most part, overtaken by gender activists. But the vast majority of 4-year US universities, attended by the vast majority of college students pursuing a bachelor's degree, are not major research institutions like Stanford and Berkeley. They are regional campuses, such as my own, Angelo State University, which is part of the Texas Tech University system. In the US, the majority of students who learn about feminist thought in their classes have mainstream views about transgender ideology and their professors do too. The recent trend of representing everyone discussing feminism in US college classrooms as a bunch of gullible Judith Butler fans is an unforced error on our part, and I think it will prove to be counterproductive for our cause.
Great article. In med school, we learn about the great doctors from the turn of the century who pioneered new treatments (like you mention, insulin, penicillin). We don't learn about the ones who used to x-ray women's ovaries over and over again to cure vague symptoms... I had no idea that was a thing. There is really a throughline to quackery today in 2025. We should probably learn more about the cautionary tales.
I feel like I am getting so close to understanding where this whole thing came from. This article helped. Let me try to put it into words. Adult transsexuals really, really want hormonal and surgical treatment. In the past, it was expensive and difficult to access. In order to medically justifying its widespread availability (and getting it paid for by insurance), we must believe that no other treatment (such as therapy) could possibly help, and that transsexual identity never changes. Therefore, these adults must have been "trans kids" once upon a time. Therefore, trans kids must exist, and they are destined to become trans adults no matter what, and nothing but hormones and surgery will be heal their mental pain. Therefore, we may as well get a jump on transitioning them as minors, since they will be doomed to lifelong unhappiness otherwise. So trans kids must exist and transitioning them has to be the right thing, so that insurance will pay for widespread hormonal and surgical treatment for transgender adults.
For the most ardent activists since the late 80s, I think their top priority is status rather than insurance coverage. They want to be seen as the opposite sex and/or special.
Many reasons for dragging kids into it. The fetishists are trying to sanitize the concept of trans. Tans activism appropriates gay themes/arguments, and gay rights activists argued they were born that way, ie, they'd been gay kids at some point.
"Always felt I was the opposite sex" is baked into trans tradition because the early gatekeepers basically required them to say it.
Doctors like Sue Bradley and Ken Zucker started actively "treating" potentially transsexual kids in the 70s, so you could say they invented the concept of trans kids. Then it was a business.
I’m just going to point out who I seem to be here, my earliest memory was gearing up to be a female stripper and being VERY aware I’m actually an autistic heterosexual guy with “phantom limb syndrome” if you will about long sexy blonde hair and a female nervous system that can curve and bend like a lap dance or stripper.. and I’m stuck partway there because of my hormone level. This is my earliest memory (then the lolcow condition of being moderately autistic, aka having (creative) hobbies far away from everyone like a weird shut in despite being a funny extrovert. This has never changed daily, I throw out male boxer briefs or clothes every Christmas from my parents and they found out I wear makeup and shave my legs and stuff and cry and act like a gay guy or a girl or whatever when I was going through puberty (plus trying to sing and act like a strange guy or a female from time to time) this is apparently what M2F trans people are ALL like.. except they keep saying they’re gay heh. I am totally heterosexual with elevated estrogen (and testosterone) naturally with a big sassy attitude sometimes with lisps, bulimia, amphetamine addiction to look skinny like a super model (I act like a female model) etc etc this is daily and never stopping plus my brain is plainly mapped to have female disorders, attitudes, opinions etc despite mostly being a male brain (with elevated estradiol naturally this is processed coming out of the testicles into the body mixed with having a prostrate) puberty is/was obviously an issue despite enjoying being 6 feet tall and extremely fast, strong, powerful and agile in mind and body because it had lots of body/facial hair and hair loss on my bed (I style bangs, layer my hair, haispray, blowdry, use female shampoos for nice smells and exfoliate my skin and use body lotions all the etc + also having to shave facial hair like an ugly transvestite looking thing I’ve usually avoided that appearance most of my life) this is not made up. yes children will go through this endlessly it’s like being born gay.. usually they have both going on. female careers and not enjoying testosterone or male puberty i am sure applies to everyone. also I turn into an actual lesbian encoded looking and acting thing, a sporty Scottish-Jewish musician athlete kind (imagine what I look like with green hair) anyways cya!
Rewards much repeated reading I am sure, Benjamin was an opportunist quack wasn't he, evidently the guidelines of the Harry Benjamin society were designed to have the veneer of medicine, ie medicine is good at laundering bad ideas into culture. How many bad faith people have intervened since and how many unreliable narrators play their part in upholding the fantasy. Of course Hirschfeld himself had been hawking pharmaceuticals including testifortan, an early concoction of bull testical tissue, so how much grifting reinforced the ideology? Hirschfeld seemed predisposed to ideology having early religious enthusiasm and had flung himself into other prior causes with great zeal. Perhaps his closeted homosexuality pointed naturally, in a Lacanian libidinal motive towards the endpoint of his sexology ideology.
(Yes I know this word salary but felt like an adjacent thread;)
History had already laid all the necessary concepts for the current time, it's only in the late modern period where technologies (the internet), postmodern ideas, pseudo-religious ideology and a widespread lack of meaning combine in the current social disrupting contagion.
People are lost and find it too hard to reason because they have no ontology to ground them. In the 19th century gays were the third sex, because sex with another man was clearly evidence of being a kind of woman within a man. But we now know what sex actually is and how it is possible to be homosexual and still totally a man/woman.
You brilliantly catalogue an equally homophobic elimination of homosexuality by Benjamin. But we have the science now, we know we have sex, and we have sexuality, and we have cultural ideas. It's easy to obfuscate these layers but we need to reclaim the ground of reality.
Yes, and it's probably one of those things that takes more time than it should and your blog series is already a treasure trove.
I don't take myself too seriously but have pretensions on a grand narrative around the history of trans through modernity, a mistake of modernity, but have little spare time and can't match the compelling style of writers like yourself- I'm dry as toast. So I post a lot of comments;) I had actually given up on spending time on this issue but seeing your posts brought me back. It's all so fascinating (and frequently sordid and strange). It's emblematic of where we are right now, nearly everything runs through it.
You miss the point, trans is a culture bound syndrome and the story is of how the ideas morph and change alongside other forces, first cross-dressers, then transvestites, transgenders, consumer cosmetic medicine, trans as non-pathological/human right. But there is also the recent contagion via censored internet bubbles combined with micro identities from Tumblr mixing with normal adolescent doubts in the meaning crisis of the current time and an ideological progressivism that has mainstreamed these bad ideas from history which as Glenna describes are insidious attempts to overthrow basic norms often due to status seeking, grifting and wanting everything to get weird.
Well done summary, kudos.
A note: We are in 2025, and sociobiology and ethology, and other biological disciplines have identified for decades male (and female) animals who hide their sex in order to avoid male aggression, and for males, to gain entrance to female enclaves for sex.
There is no puzzle, no Jan Morris “Conundrum”, no “phenomenon”other than widely observed animal sex mimicry occurring compulsively in humans. (Humans are in general instinctive mimics - from birth!)
Empirically, humans exhibit the behavior of sex mimicry for the same reasons other animals do - to avoid male aggression (“trans” die of violent assault at half the rates of other men), and to gain access to female enclaves (gyms, changing rooms, women’s festivals, bathrooms, etc - we’ve heard it all). Male sex mimics who commit sex crimes do so at 3x to 5x the rate of ordinary sex criminals. It evolved because it works.
One day soon psychology and medicine will catch up to the last 50-odd years of animal sociobiology. Lying, cheating, deception and stealing have been well-documented animal behaviors for a century or more, if not for millennia. It has always been clear that humans share many complex behaviors with other animals.
Once we shed peculiar 19th century views of human behavior (Freud was a treasure trove of mythology) and root our understanding in empirical, observational biology a lot of the Benjamin mythology will clear up.
Until then, the nonsense will never stop.
As an endocrinologist who associated with doctors of that era, experimenting on people by removing testicles and ovaries, and cavorting around with charlatans, it is no surprise he was the architect of this movement. Have you read PHARMA by Gerald Posner? It has a lot of history of the pharma industry in the 20th century. Greed was at the center of it.
This is an incredibly well researched and fascinating history. Somebody should make a movie about this. Thank you for this great and thought-provoking writing!
Yeah, and the movie can have a parallel thread about all the women who, since the 1960s, due to lack of medical research and healthcare, did not receive treatment for various endocrine disorders like endometriosis, autoimmune diseases, diabetes and poly cystic ovarian syndrome. Wow! So much easier to just hand out estrogen and testosterone prescriptions!
Lots of interesting content, but not an entirely convincing form. Firstly, Benjamin's shenanigans are pretty well known to anyone interested in trans history - as your sources attest to. He's not that forgotten or neglected. As an example of how trans activists still reference him, see the latest post from the substack The One Percent. Secondly, some of your points aiming to show similarities with Benjamin are a bit of a stretch. That said, the continuing influence of his key mad ideas (split sex into bits, therapy never helps, give patients what they want, etc) absolutely deserves to be highlighted.
Your points about Harry Benjamin's legacy and the unfair blame of feminism for the rise of transgender ideology are brilliant!
Judith Butler, Sonia Corrêa and other post modernist feminists are not exactly blameless. Judith Butler even wrote a chapter in a book that Susan Stryker edited in 2006 on transgendered identities.
I completely agree about Judith Butler's blame here. But as an academic feminist myself, I've found the common assumption that Butler now dominates feminist scholarship to be exaggerated, to say the least. Most feminist scholars don't engage at all with Butler. In fact, most of us research various aspects of women's lives (work, creativity, sexuality, legal rights, etc.) unburdened by the baggage of postmodern theory. Many of my like-minded colleagues think that transgenderism's challenge to the female sex category has distracted feminist scholars, especially younger ones, from our true work. Naively, I had figured back in the 90's that Butler's influence on feminist studies was just an "emperor's new clothes" trend that would fade away quickly. I regret not speaking out (until recently) against the excesses of transgender ideology over the last thirty years. During those years, I was busy teaching and writing about American women's fiction, and I found myself expecting optimistically that the Butler trend would disappear soon enough. Kathleen Stock's Material Girls (2021) and her unjust treatment in academia shook me out of that misguided optimism.
So . . . my comment was quite specifically directed at post modernist feminists like Judith Butler and Sonia Corrêa. I am not an academic feminist. I do sometimes call myself a feminist, but one big beef I have with American feminists (as opposed to Canadian feminists of the 1960s onward) is the failure of American feminists to defend maternity leave and breast feeding. That is why I sometimes do not call myself a feminist.
In important ways, academic feminism went off the rails in other ways sometime in the 1990s. It wasn't just the post modernist feminists.
I think we should stop defending feminism or academic feminism so adamantly. There really are major divergences now between the lived lives and needs of most women, on the one hand, and the ideas being advocated for among most American academic feminists, on the other.
Kathleen Stock does come close to what I think on many issues. I did read Material Girls and thought it excellent. So there is, no doubt, a place for academic feminism. But Kathleen Stock is British and grew up in Scotland. There's a strong vein of Presbyterianism in her thinking.
In the workplace and in law, the ideas of academic feminists are frequently adopted. They do impact women in the workplace outside academia.
In the last ten years or so, most of the efforts of women to address sexual harassment have been sublimated under hyper protective trans rights policies. The University of California just made it an offense to not use the preferred pronouns of a trans person. Meanwhile, that very same university system for years tolerated severe cases of sexual harassment and have never implemented a similarly severe policy against the sexual harassment of women.
So, whatever American academic feminists are doing, more recently, it doesn't seem to be translating very well into policies that protect women and girls. We're having to fight like hell to save Title IX. In California, we can't even stop prostitution of minors. Sex trafficking is rampant. There has been no improvement on the gender pay gap in ten years. In engineering (my field), even with the same degree, experience, and job classification, women, on average, are paid ten percent less than men.
I agree these issues at the University of California need to be addressed. In my experience, however, university administrators and HR officers cause these problems, not feminist professors. And, sadly, we feminist academics don't now have enough political clout on our own to enact policies to combat sex trafficking or to close the pay gap. Feminist researchers study these problems, though, and they provide data and insights to political activists dedicated to dealing with them. Doing research about the many facets of women's lives is acadmic feminists' main purpose. Some of this research creates knowledge with policy implications, of course, but I do not think feminist researchers should necessarily be responsible for establishing and enacting policy and blamed for policy makers' failures to do so. By stigmatizing all academic feminists, most of whom do not promote transgender ideology, and unfairly blaming them for instigating a destructive movement that was actually started by Harry Benjamin et al., we are in danger of cutting off our nose to spite our face.
I'm not stigmatizing all academic feminists.
Still, all of the women's studies departments in the universities in which I studied (Carleton University in Ottawa, Simon Fraser University and the university of British Columbia) that were hotbeds of feminist activism in the 1980s and early 1990s) have been converted to gender studies departments. As an alumni of these universities, I'm often asked to donate to these departments. I find these "gender" studies program unrecognizable. And it is not just me. Having spoken at length with the feminists such as Meghan Murphy, who studied in the women's studies department at Simon Fraser University, she confirmed to me that her department was taken over by gender activists.
It is no secret that very wealthly gender proponents have donated generously to former women's studies departments and largely or completely converted them to gender studies departments. Universities such as the University of Victoria, Simon Fraser University, the University of California at Berkeley, the University of British Columbia, Carleton University, and Stanford, to name a few, have been heavily influenced by donations from the Stryker family, the Pritzker family, Martine Rothblatt, the Weinstein Family and Robert Quartermain.
Susan Stryker: visiting speaker at the gender studies program at Stanford:
https://gender.stanford.edu/news/institute-announces-three-year-collaboration-history-professor-and-trans-studies-scholar-susan
Yes, there are still feminists in gender and women's studies departments working to advance the cause of women, but to say there hasn't been big money influencing of gender studies departments that have distorted feminist voices is profoundly naive.
Yes, women's studies programs at elite universities in the US (both private universities and flagship state universities) have been, for the most part, overtaken by gender activists. But the vast majority of 4-year US universities, attended by the vast majority of college students pursuing a bachelor's degree, are not major research institutions like Stanford and Berkeley. They are regional campuses, such as my own, Angelo State University, which is part of the Texas Tech University system. In the US, the majority of students who learn about feminist thought in their classes have mainstream views about transgender ideology and their professors do too. The recent trend of representing everyone discussing feminism in US college classrooms as a bunch of gullible Judith Butler fans is an unforced error on our part, and I think it will prove to be counterproductive for our cause.
Great and fascinating history of this monster and excellent linking of all this to the present day.
Have cross posted
https://dustymasterson.substack.com/p/the-firm-no-lawyers-ever-left-alive
Dusty
Great article. In med school, we learn about the great doctors from the turn of the century who pioneered new treatments (like you mention, insulin, penicillin). We don't learn about the ones who used to x-ray women's ovaries over and over again to cure vague symptoms... I had no idea that was a thing. There is really a throughline to quackery today in 2025. We should probably learn more about the cautionary tales.
I feel like I am getting so close to understanding where this whole thing came from. This article helped. Let me try to put it into words. Adult transsexuals really, really want hormonal and surgical treatment. In the past, it was expensive and difficult to access. In order to medically justifying its widespread availability (and getting it paid for by insurance), we must believe that no other treatment (such as therapy) could possibly help, and that transsexual identity never changes. Therefore, these adults must have been "trans kids" once upon a time. Therefore, trans kids must exist, and they are destined to become trans adults no matter what, and nothing but hormones and surgery will be heal their mental pain. Therefore, we may as well get a jump on transitioning them as minors, since they will be doomed to lifelong unhappiness otherwise. So trans kids must exist and transitioning them has to be the right thing, so that insurance will pay for widespread hormonal and surgical treatment for transgender adults.
Is that right?
For the most ardent activists since the late 80s, I think their top priority is status rather than insurance coverage. They want to be seen as the opposite sex and/or special.
Many reasons for dragging kids into it. The fetishists are trying to sanitize the concept of trans. Tans activism appropriates gay themes/arguments, and gay rights activists argued they were born that way, ie, they'd been gay kids at some point.
"Always felt I was the opposite sex" is baked into trans tradition because the early gatekeepers basically required them to say it.
Doctors like Sue Bradley and Ken Zucker started actively "treating" potentially transsexual kids in the 70s, so you could say they invented the concept of trans kids. Then it was a business.
Here's my piece on Zucker:
https://badfacts.substack.com/p/right-before-puberty-blockers-landed
And the early days of socially transitioning kids:
https://badfacts.substack.com/p/the-trans-child-media-blitz
I’m just going to point out who I seem to be here, my earliest memory was gearing up to be a female stripper and being VERY aware I’m actually an autistic heterosexual guy with “phantom limb syndrome” if you will about long sexy blonde hair and a female nervous system that can curve and bend like a lap dance or stripper.. and I’m stuck partway there because of my hormone level. This is my earliest memory (then the lolcow condition of being moderately autistic, aka having (creative) hobbies far away from everyone like a weird shut in despite being a funny extrovert. This has never changed daily, I throw out male boxer briefs or clothes every Christmas from my parents and they found out I wear makeup and shave my legs and stuff and cry and act like a gay guy or a girl or whatever when I was going through puberty (plus trying to sing and act like a strange guy or a female from time to time) this is apparently what M2F trans people are ALL like.. except they keep saying they’re gay heh. I am totally heterosexual with elevated estrogen (and testosterone) naturally with a big sassy attitude sometimes with lisps, bulimia, amphetamine addiction to look skinny like a super model (I act like a female model) etc etc this is daily and never stopping plus my brain is plainly mapped to have female disorders, attitudes, opinions etc despite mostly being a male brain (with elevated estradiol naturally this is processed coming out of the testicles into the body mixed with having a prostrate) puberty is/was obviously an issue despite enjoying being 6 feet tall and extremely fast, strong, powerful and agile in mind and body because it had lots of body/facial hair and hair loss on my bed (I style bangs, layer my hair, haispray, blowdry, use female shampoos for nice smells and exfoliate my skin and use body lotions all the etc + also having to shave facial hair like an ugly transvestite looking thing I’ve usually avoided that appearance most of my life) this is not made up. yes children will go through this endlessly it’s like being born gay.. usually they have both going on. female careers and not enjoying testosterone or male puberty i am sure applies to everyone. also I turn into an actual lesbian encoded looking and acting thing, a sporty Scottish-Jewish musician athlete kind (imagine what I look like with green hair) anyways cya!
Rewards much repeated reading I am sure, Benjamin was an opportunist quack wasn't he, evidently the guidelines of the Harry Benjamin society were designed to have the veneer of medicine, ie medicine is good at laundering bad ideas into culture. How many bad faith people have intervened since and how many unreliable narrators play their part in upholding the fantasy. Of course Hirschfeld himself had been hawking pharmaceuticals including testifortan, an early concoction of bull testical tissue, so how much grifting reinforced the ideology? Hirschfeld seemed predisposed to ideology having early religious enthusiasm and had flung himself into other prior causes with great zeal. Perhaps his closeted homosexuality pointed naturally, in a Lacanian libidinal motive towards the endpoint of his sexology ideology.
(Yes I know this word salary but felt like an adjacent thread;)
History had already laid all the necessary concepts for the current time, it's only in the late modern period where technologies (the internet), postmodern ideas, pseudo-religious ideology and a widespread lack of meaning combine in the current social disrupting contagion.
People are lost and find it too hard to reason because they have no ontology to ground them. In the 19th century gays were the third sex, because sex with another man was clearly evidence of being a kind of woman within a man. But we now know what sex actually is and how it is possible to be homosexual and still totally a man/woman.
You brilliantly catalogue an equally homophobic elimination of homosexuality by Benjamin. But we have the science now, we know we have sex, and we have sexuality, and we have cultural ideas. It's easy to obfuscate these layers but we need to reclaim the ground of reality.
Are you going to turn this all into a book?
Not sure. I like blogging. If I wrote a book it might focus on the legal system's failure to detect the lies of trans.
Thanks for your close readings and analytical comments!
Yes, and it's probably one of those things that takes more time than it should and your blog series is already a treasure trove.
I don't take myself too seriously but have pretensions on a grand narrative around the history of trans through modernity, a mistake of modernity, but have little spare time and can't match the compelling style of writers like yourself- I'm dry as toast. So I post a lot of comments;) I had actually given up on spending time on this issue but seeing your posts brought me back. It's all so fascinating (and frequently sordid and strange). It's emblematic of where we are right now, nearly everything runs through it.
Things I wish I didn’t know.
You miss the point, trans is a culture bound syndrome and the story is of how the ideas morph and change alongside other forces, first cross-dressers, then transvestites, transgenders, consumer cosmetic medicine, trans as non-pathological/human right. But there is also the recent contagion via censored internet bubbles combined with micro identities from Tumblr mixing with normal adolescent doubts in the meaning crisis of the current time and an ideological progressivism that has mainstreamed these bad ideas from history which as Glenna describes are insidious attempts to overthrow basic norms often due to status seeking, grifting and wanting everything to get weird.