The Origins of the Transgender Movement – National Review

Flag at a protest against Trump administration transgender policies in New York City in 2018.(Brendan McDermid/Reuters)We must not ignore cultural blind spots that put children at risk of abuse.

Editors Note: This article has been adapted from remarks delivered at a Heritage Foundation summit.

Ive been asked to talk about the origins of transgenderism and how it relates to children and their exploitation. But first, I would like to start with a little story.

Yesterday I was wandering around outside the Supreme Court chatting with some people who were there to support whats known as the LGBTQ+ community. I spoke with a lovely guy who identified as homosexual and then four teenage girls who identified as lesbian and queer. They asked me what I thought of the Human Rights Campaign, so I told them up front that I think its a force for tremendous harm in this country. Then, I asked them what they thought of Martin Luther Kings idea, the one about not defining people by irrelevant characteristics like their skin color, or in this case their sexual desires. They said it sounded like a very good idea.

Later, two men who were slightly less open-minded wanted to tell me about some horrible feminists called terfs who are apparently in cahoots with an even more horrible right-wing institution I probably hadnt heard of because Im Scottish. Its called the Heritage Foundation. So, if anyone knows anyone from there, just let me know, because I want to make sure I dont die by association.

The reason I mention this story, of course, is other than the Heritage Foundation being a symbol for all that is evil and far-right in American politics my experience with the LGBTQ+ community was that it wasnt really a community so much as it was a big mishmash of people who feel they belong to a certain cause for very different reasons. Yet they were all there at the end of the rainbow to claim their pot of gold, which they had been promised by the Human Rights Campaign.

Ive been asked to get to the origins of this movement, and Im going to try to do that. Of course, as you know, its just one stripe of the rainbow, and I couldnt possibly do it justice in ten minutes, but Ill do my absolute best. There are three things that I think have been changing since the mid-20th century. The first is in medicine, the second is what I like to call an ontology of desire, and the third is what I and others call the politicization of everything.

Lets start with medicine. When sex-change surgeries became surgically possible in the post-war period, it was understood to be something of a euphemism. Of course, a person couldnt literally change from one sex to the other, itd be more accurate to call it genital surgery, but people were trying to be euphemistic. These procedures were highly controversial, in part because they werent always that successful.

You mightve seen the movie The Danish Girl, and youre familiar with the Heritage Foundations Ryan Andersons book, in which he talks a lot about Paul McHugh, the psychiatrist who had to put an end to the surgeries in the 1970s at Johns Hopkins University, which he described as collaborating with madness. Thats how he called it. People who wanted to change their sex back then were called transsexuals. That was a term popularized by an endocrinologist, Harry Benjamin. Demand was fairly low; it was mostly males wanting to become females. Its complicated, but sexologists realized there were two types of male-to-female transsexuals.

There was the homosexual transsexual. Thats the person who feels inconspicuously feminine and uncomfortable as a man and is actually a deeply sympathetic figure, I think. Then theres the person with autogynophilia. Thats the person who finds the thought of themselves as a woman to be sexually exciting. Studies of interviews with such individuals, conducted by sexologists like Ray Blanchard or Anne Lawrence, suggest that its anything ranging from a man whos turned on from the check assistants calling him maam, to somebody who likes to urinate on sanitary pads and to pretend theyre menstruating, and many other things that I think many of us would find too unpleasant to dwell on so early in the morning.

In my friend Douglas Murrays new book, The Madness of Crowds, he explains that the struggle for defining things turned into this hardware versus software issue. So, intersex for instance, is very much a hardware issue. You cant exactly get concerned about somebody who has a hardware issue because thats not their fault. Of course, the reality with homosexuality is that its most likely some kind of combination of the two. People may be predisposed to certain proclivities, then theres environment and so forth, but in any case, like Martin Luther Kings point, dont define people by that.

This brings me to my second point, which was what Im calling the ontology of desire. Thats basically when in the 1990s, the definition of trans began to change. Transsexualism, specifically as a sexual fetish, as autogynephilia, had been known as a perversion. This was politically incorrect, so they changed it to paraphilia, which became politically incorrect and is now known as an identity. The broader term gender dysphoria (formerly gender identity disorder) is actually still listed in the Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, so its still a disorder in the DSM, but thatll likely change.

Transgenderism was widened, adopted, and celebrated in the academy, in large part thanks to people like Judith Butler, who thought that gender was a performance. This is where it gets really interesting in the contradictions. On the one hand, this is Murrays point, transgenderism is a hardware issue for trans people, but for everyone else gender is a software issue. So, if you think about it, the only people who are born women are trans women, which is rather an astonishing claim.

This is where the boys brain in a girls body stuff comes in, which turns out to be more of a metaphor. A more accurate metaphor might be that of a soul a gendered soul, the fundamental essence of a person. It goes back a very long way to the Gnostic heresies in Ancient times. The idea is that matter is less important and that its all about your spirit or your essence. The exploitation of language evolved so quickly that basically everybody calling a trans woman she initially that was meant to be a courtesy to accommodate people not to make somebody who has had a hard life have a harder life is now meant to signal our absolute uncontested belief in their femaleness, which it doesnt, because trans women are men. Not that there is anything wrong with being a man. Even if some people are uncomfortable being men. And fair enough.

The third point is the massive cultural and political tidal wave. The thing is, in the 1990s people might have been forgiven for thinking, This will never catch on. This is so outrageous. This is absurd. They would obviously be right, but the thing was the Internet and all these other things came into play. Society had just gotten used to defining whole sections of the population by their desires with regards to homosexuality, which was trying to correct genuine injustices that gay people faced in this country and still face across the world. They overcorrected and they became obsessed with identity. We moved further and further away from the sort of vision that Martin Luther King set out. We started to lose sight of all these different intricacies with regard to sexuality. Then, trans piggybacked onto gay rights, which had piggybacked onto civil rights.

A whole system of buzzwords popped up, like transphobia, transmisogyny, and conversion therapy, and all these buzz words that make people think, Gosh I dont want to be on the wrong side of history. I should say though, when I was at this thing yesterday with the LGBT crowd, when the police moved and we were walking down to the Supreme Court, it did kind of feel like it was this big angry mob chasing a bunch of women, which I have to say didnt really feel like being on the right side of history, but maybe Ill be proven wrong.

The point about civil rights is very important, which is perhaps why I dont get it as much, coming from a different country. In America, rightly, people are very sensitive about civil rights and their very embarrassing history in that area. They dont want to repeat that, and I think thats a good impulse and we should respect that impulse. But of course, its been used by people like the Human Rights Campaign for their own cynical ends.

Which brings me onto the final point: What has any of this got to do with sexualizing children?

I want to suggest two things. The first is that its created a massive cultural blind spot. Psychologists have always understood transsexualism to relate or to potentially relate to adult sexuality. We could have a debate about whether we think urinating on sanitary pads is normal behavior or not, we can have that debate, but it is about sexuality. Its been masked by an ideology, and because of the politics of it all, theres a great fear for many people. Its a legitimate fear because they might get fired, or worse, for signaling some terrible phobia.

This becomes very obvious in the subject of drag. Drag, which means dressed as girl, comes from the Elizabethan period when women were forbidden from performing publicly, so men assumed the role of women. For some drag queens I was speaking to one yesterday, James Davis, whose stage name is Elaine Lancaster it really is about performance. I come from the U.K. where we have this genre of theater called pantomime, and its funny. Its just men dressed up as women called dames. But these things are very context dependent.

Davis yesterday was agreeing with me. While he was saying that for him its about performance, he recognizes that when hes in bars and other public places, people come up to him at the end, and its all about sex for them. As an adult, who knows that and understands that, he can deal with it. He can say whether he wants to get involved or not after all, its a free country but why would we put children in that situation? Why would we invite salacious interest in children by dressing them up in drag? We shouldnt do that, and Im referring here to a whole new phenomenon called drag kids.

The argument were supposed to accept rather unthinkingly is that, Oh youre just being bigoted, and youre just prejudiced, because this about self-expression. And Im thinking well no, because yes children dress up, but again, its context dependent.

The analogy I would invite you to think about here is imagine a little girl in a bikini. Shes 13 years old, in her parents private pool. Is it a big problem that shes wearing a bikini? No, its not a big problem. Shes in her parents private pool. But if the same girl, in the same bikini, still 13 years old, is walking down a catwalk in a room full of adults, would we all feel uncomfortable? Yes, we all would feel uncomfortable. Its a completely different thing, and its the same when it comes to drag.

This is not hypothetical. I invite you to look up the case of Desmond is Amazing, who should really be called Desmond needs saving because this poor little boy is dressed up in drag, gyrating in gay clubs in Brooklyn, and few have said anything because to do so would be homophobic. Well, no, sorry. Because this drag queen and other gay people would say the same thing on this its just not on. It is not, and never should be, acceptable to sexualize children.

Our friends at the Humans Rights Campaign would prefer that none of us knew these intricacies, that people like me didnt exist to remind you of them, that people like James Davis (the drag queen) didnt exist, or those open minded people at the rally who thought that Martin Luther King had a point didnt exist. They would prefer that the only people who opposed the sexualization of children were like the horrible, frightening right-wing boogeyman the Heritage Foundation. Everyone whos too scared to talk about this will just have to get over that because theres too much at stake, Im sorry to say. And to be honest, the worst thing they can do is say that youre the boogeyman, and you just say, Boo. And then thats it, youre done.

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The Origins of the Transgender Movement - National Review