I Was Once a Fervent Trans Activist. Then I Detransitioned.

Deconstructing the philosophical claims of gender identity ideology

I want to start this piece with a sincere apology for contributing to cancel culture. You see, I had once tried to paint Kathleen Stock and other “Gender Critical”-adjacent academics as being terrible bigots and transphobes who were actively contributing to harm against trans people.

I now regret these character assassinations and have come to understand them as being motivated by ideological trans activism. 

I first came out as a trans woman in 2015 when I was 28 years old, having been swept up in a particular cultural zeitgeist known as the “trans tipping point” when Laverne Cox was on the cover of Time magazine and Caitlyn Jenner was giving interviews in mainstream media. 

The root cause of my crossgender desires is rooted in what some sexologists call autogynephilia, a controversial theory that has gotten its proponents such as Dr. Michael Bailey canceled by trans activists, a cancel campaign that was famously documented in Alice Dreger’s book Galileo’s Finger. In my own trans activism, I sharply critiqued this theory as transphobic, but I have since come to terms with its basic scientific truth, as socially uncomfortable as it is to admit that my desire for transition for motivated by a psychosexual forces.

When I came out, I was in a PhD program studying philosophy. I quickly started getting involved in transgender activism under the username of “transphilosopher.” First on tumblr, then on my own blog, Medium essays, eventually building up a sizable activist following on Twitter and culminating in a collection of essays published by Jessica Kingsley Publishers entitled Transgressive.

As part of my trans journey, I became a strident Social Justice Warrior under the guise of what would now be considered “Wokeism.” One essay that was particularly illustrative of my allegiance to trans activism was an article examining the metaphysics of “girldick,” a claim to fame that made me a target of Gender Critical feminists as “peak trans.”

Eventually, I dropped out of my PhD program, got a career in the corporate world, and stopped getting embroiled in activist debates on Twitter.

However, eight years to the day after I started my social transition, I had what can only be considered an epiphany and stopped hormone replacement therapy cold turkey. Partly this was due to serious health complications that came from hormones years earlier and a desire not to be a lifelong medical patient, but another motivation was a deep-seated realization that I wanted to be “normal” again.

I had grown tired of the social anxiety and self-consciousness that comes from not “passing” and always being in my head about how people might perceive me and internally stinging from the inevitability of being “misgendered.” 

Another motivation, thanks to my wife, whom I met when I trans, was from actually exposing myself to the narratives of detransitioners and listening with an open mind to people who are critical of what is generally considered “gender ideology.”

What is gender ideology you might ask? The core of the worldview is that if someone thinks, feels, or identifies as a woman, then they 100% are a woman with no qualifications, no asterisks, no ifs, ands, or buts. But if you ask, “What is the thing you are identifying as?” there are usually no good answers forthcoming.

While it was seductive at first, I’ve come to realize gender ideology is full of internal contradictions.

If you say trans women are males who identify as women, some trans activists will say that’s transphobic because they don’t “identify as women” they are women.

But then if you ask them what they mean by “woman” they’ll usually either state some sexist stereotype (e.g. “I’m sensitive and like feminine things”) or they’ll give a circular definition and say “a woman is anyone who identifies as a woman,” in which case they now can’t explain what’s transphobic about saying trans women are males who identify as women.

But then they might say, “well, I’m on HRT and therefore I’m really female, not male.” Besides being patently empirically false, this leads to another contradiction because it’s a tenet of modern gender theory that a pre-transition trans woman is just as much a woman as a dysphoric post-transition trans woman. 

So now it can’t be anything uniquely physiological that defines being a trans woman because males pre-transition and “females” post-transition are equally valid as women, which is only explainable on the circular identity model.

Except they want to have their cake and eat it too because they want the intersex brain theory to be true such that it’s having a “female brain” that makes them a woman, which defies the original claim that a woman is anyone who identifies as a woman, as opposed to a woman is someone with a certain physical brain structure. 

After all, if the brain can determine gender, since the brain is just a physical organ, it sets a precedent for other body parts logically being capable of determining gender as well (e.g. your reproductive system). So that’s too reductive.

Gender ideology can’t decide whether being trans is a subjective experience or a medical condition. It can’t decide if it’s a social construction or reducible to your brain. It can’t decide if it’s an identity or a performative social aesthetic.

Gender ideology wants to have its cake and eat it too. But as soon as it takes a logical stand on one of these conceptions it risks saying a trans person who doesn’t meet the criteria might be “invalid,” so it always retreats to pure identity and subjectivity when challenged. 

But if it’s pure identity then it has no philosophical grounds to say it’s transphobic to say trans women are just males who identify as women.

At this point, all gender ideology can do is say that this whole line of questioning is transphobic and serving the interests of “cis normativity” and that we ought to just shut up and accept whatever trans people say even if it's philosophically contradictory because challenging the underlying ideology is always harmful to an oppressed group and that’s always the important part. 

Any philosophical criticism gets accused of being transphobic and violent hate speech and that we should just shut up and listen to trans people, even if the criticism comes from trans people or people who used to be trans people.

At the end of the day, we are left confused and befuddled about what basic words like “male” or “female,” “man” or woman” actually mean and we end up in a twisted morass of postmodern subjectivity.

Another core bugaboo of trans activism is an insistence that the “sex binary” between male and female is a product of transphobic Western colonialism, a view popularly promoted by the founding matriarch of Gender Studies/Queer studies/Trans studies: Judith Butler. 

In a talk for her upcoming book, “Who’s Afraid of Gender” Judith Butler says the sexual dimorphism of male vs female is an “observational imperative” of Western colonialism. 

This idea is the root rot of postmodern trans ideology, which believes the objective truth of the sex binary between egg producers vs sperm producers is only true relative to hegemonic discourse, where “hegemonic” is usually just a synonym for “Western civilization.”

Butler believes that if trans people had hegemonic cultural power instead of Western non-trans people, then the “objective” truth of the sex binary would be different because truth is relative to whoever holds cultural power.

For trans activists, the very notion of objectivity is seen as suspect. 

Butler thinks if only society wasn’t so transphobic then the objective evolutionary truth of the egg-sperm binary would magically change because it’s only because of transphobic colonialism that we have “imposed” the observation of the sex binary.

The claim is that we’d observe something else if we weren’t so transphobic as Westerners. 

This is pure sophistry because she relies on the trivially true observation that human perception is to some extent culturally mediated to make a much stronger claim that truly objective observation of reality is impossible and that the only possible reason why Western science has observed the sex binary is because of the “imposition” of transphobia and other isms.

This rejection of objectivity as an imposition of hegemonic power is why the modern gender discourse has become so intractable and confused. Because science itself is seen as a tool for oppression vs a tool for knowledge.

Instead of the male vs female dimorphism being an objective biological fact that theoretically unifies the evolutionary sciences, the sciences are now conceived as “sites of power” where knowledge production itself becomes a “problematic” instead of an empirical method for determining objective reality.

The ultimate implication of Butler’s work is that there’s now “feminist science” and “Western science” and the only way to mediate between the two is not through an objective assessment of the facts but through political struggle. 

Science becomes reduced to politics, and politics gets reduced to personal feelings.

Make no mistake, Gender Studies is not merely doing good faith sociology of science. They are attempting to undermine the very epistemological heart of the Enlightenment itself for the sake of liberation.

I’ve come to realize it is an intellectual charade. And a seductive one at that. It is philosophical navel-gazing masquerading as serious inquiry. And it has leaked out of the ivory tower into the real world impacting the material reality of sports, to give just one obvious example.

Coming back to my original character assassination of Kathleen Stock and Gender Critical feminists as “anti-trans,” I now realize that “anti-trans” often functions as a thought-terminating cliche because it usually fails to distinguish between being against trans ideology and specifically wishing ill on trans people. 

It’d be like calling criticism of diet culture “anti-anorexic.”

On the sports issue, it’d be like calling anti-doping “anti-cyclist.”

On the pediatric medicine question, the thought-terminating cliche of “anti-trans” also fails to consider that the criticism is not coming from personal antagonism against these children, but rather, from a genuine feeling of paternalism, the restriction of freedom for the sake of their best interests.

We can debate what’s truly in their best interest, but the “anti-trans” cliche immediately stops rational discussion by impugning the moral character of those with alternative perspectives on how to achieve an optimal outcome.

It’d be like calling people against lobotomy “anti-mental health.” 

The cliche “anti-trans” is meant to immediately stop all rational discourse and bludgeon people with a moralistic sanction by saying their opponents must automatically be “on the wrong side of history.”

We can simultaneously acknowledge that some people genuinely do have an irrational hatred of trans people while also acknowledging that people who criticize trans ideology are not necessarily doing so because they are “anti” trans people, but because they either (1) are “pro” the rights of another demographic that has conflicting rights in certain social and legal contexts (e.g. sports) or (2) genuine disagreement on the best way to achieve an optimal outcome in a pediatric population where we ordinarily have no trouble with paternalism in other contexts.

Often detransition stories are framed in terms of medical regret from surgeries and other medical interventions, particularly those performed on minors. I think the question of pediatric transition is an important question of medical ethics and when the European medical systems that pioneered pediatric transition have begun to roll back these original protocols, we ought as a society to be able to discuss these issues in good faith, using the rigorous standards of evidence-based medicine, without necessarily being labeled as transphobes who are contributing to “trans genocide” or saying critics literally have “blood on their hands,” as trans activist Montana state rep Zooey Zephyr said of those who wish to stop pediatric gender transition.

The rhetoric of violence comes from the implicit threat of suicide from trans people. However, the actual data suggests actual suicide is incredibly rare and while contemplation of suicide is common in this population this is radically different than seriously planning suicide and such contemplation is almost fully explainable by preexisting mental health comorbidity in the LGBT population. And the research shows most attempts are not seriously planned, but usually cries for help. Conflating this is deeply irresponsible.

Lastly, existing violence and homicide rates are either statistically normal relative to non-trans populations or mostly explainable by the intrinsic risk factors of sex work.

In other words, in a free society we ought to tolerate the criticism of gender ideology under the liberal rights of free speech.

I am lucky to not have major medical regret from my transition as I did not get any surgeries done, but I now weigh the harms of this experience mostly in terms of what I’d now consider ideological brainwashing and the effects my activism had on influencing others to be similarly brainwashed by ideological fanaticism.