How I Became a Heretic
Some thoughts on thinking differently
Heresy, of which witchcraft was one phase, became a greater sin; the inquisition arose, and the general characteristics of the christian world rapidly grew more inimical to humanity, and especially to woman’s freedom, happiness, and security.
- Matilda Joslyn Gage, Woman, Church, and State1
Courage to face facts, to take up new knowledge, to outgrow old habits—such a virtue could not be very heartily endorsed by those whose first requirements were belief, submission, obedience.
- Charlotte Perkins Gilman, His Religion and Hers2
Medicine tells us what to eat, what to feel, how to have sex and when to have it, to name but a few of its forays into previously non-medical areas of life. It has gradually become a catholic church, exercising a universal dominion over life. Like certain periods in Roman Catholic history, medicine has been sophisticated enough to assimilate disparate and even anti-medical movements under its wing.
- Janice G. Raymond, “Medicine as Patriarchal Religion,” The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, 7, no. 2, February 19823
Before I became what many now call “anti-trans,” I was one of the people who used “LGBTQ+” uncritically. I did not believe there existed any conflicts between sexual orientation and what has been termed “gender identity.” For the most part, I thought people identifying as “trans” had always been sexually oriented to the same sex anyway, so it seemed fine. With them being homosexual, I thought, it made sense to include them. In this sense, I was like many: a presumed “trans ally,” though with growing concerns that I dared not speak.
At least, I had always been told that most “trans people” were “gay,” and I believed it, too—until I questioned it. Those who transitioned seemingly had a shared interest opposing anti-homosexual legislation—or so I thought. Little did I know, however, “trans people” being “gay” actually means that most people who identify as “trans” are heterosexual. Following “transition,” which can mean anything from just uttering magic words to any variety of cross-dressing behavior to surgery and hormones, they claim “same-gender attraction.” Typically carriers of anti-homosexual beliefs, medicalized or not, heterosexual people, involved in gay rights or not, seem as lesbian and gay as former NAACP chapter head Rachel Dolezal is Black.4
My fall into bigotry, this small-minded worldview that I now apparently possess, has actually not been the result of a far-right brainwashing. As far as I know, I have not consorted with the Devil, but I would be too tired to know. Nor have I become a religious fundamentalist, experiencing any religious conversion, that other transition. Unlike the brand of atheism that exchanges religious conversion for medical transition, I have remained consistently skeptical of religion and its transition and rebirth into secular ways of life. “Big TERF” has yet to pay me any of the big money funding bigotry from the United States to the United Kingdom. Really, I have not found any of this right-wing money that I have been hearing runs everything. So-called “TERFs,” like Janice G. Raymond, have not been pulling my strings—like in modern anti-Semitic propaganda depicting Jewish people as puppet masters.5
Irony escapes our new “born again” tyrants bringing anti-sex and anti-homosexual beliefs into the mainstream beneath another banner.
I read articles from TransAdvocate and, unfortunately, listened to men like Cristan Williams—for the first years of undergraduate studies, at least.6 To my shame, I even thought Catharine A. MacKinnon’s remarks in her 2015 interview with him made sense. I now recommend Williams and TransAdvocate as exemplifying modern totalitarian propaganda techniques. I shared posts on social media that used “LGBT,” first, and then “LGBTQ+”—as if I really understood what “the transgender umbrella” covered up. Nor did I ever quite understand what “queer” encompassed—or why, as lesbians and gay men, we need to “reclaim” a slur into a broad sexual category that includes all “deviation.” Thinking about it, the term “queer,” inclusive of sadomasochists and even pedophiles, among other paraphiliacs, has made right-wing caricatures of the modern gay rights movement into reality. Anita Bryant was more wrong than right, but “queer politics” has tried its damnedest to vindicate her.7 Irony escapes our new “born again” tyrants bringing anti-sex and anti-homosexual beliefs into the mainstream beneath another banner. My doublethink was unfortunate, but my disillusionment peaked into the first year or so into graduate school, in 2019—by the age of twenty-two.
As a side note, a lesbian feminist being presented as the puppet master orchestrating a “trans genocide”—largely against males, who had presented at gender identity clinics more often than females—is a very interesting take on an old theme of scapegoating in propaganda.8
My story of becoming a heretic is not what anybody would expect from the assumptions of modern transgender activism, namely that all “transphobes” begin as “transphobes.” By contrast, I would say that an increasing number among the so-called “anti-trans” today actually began as long-time “trans allies”—“trans advocates,” if you will. The majority of so-called “TERFs” whom I know have either been “trans allies” or were once more liberal feminists of the most laissez-faire persuasion.
Modern transgender activism has refused to reconsider its assumption that nobody would think again.
A sizable number of us “anti-trans” bigots, the new heretics, especially those leaning toward the left, likely just went along with it all—until we questioned it. The process was not sudden for me. From others whom I have talked with, it was not so for them either. Over time, I learned that so much of this activism relies on woman’s sense of herself as the nurturer of the world. She gives “the gift of life,” a cultural fetishism of altruism instilled from girlhood, which she learns matters more than her life. She gives the gift of affirming others, particularly the men in her life, even if sacrificing her own interests and those of women collectively. She gives and gives and gives. I have met women who have gone along with men’s identity claims, even the most absurd ones, because they felt that men’s suicides would be on them if they resisted and did not comply. I knew that something was very wrong. I knew there was more beneath the surface than I had first been led to believe. Modern transgender activism has refused to reconsider its assumption that nobody would think again.
Among the assumptions pervasive within “trans rights” discourse is that anybody declared a “TERF”—or “anti-trans”—has always been in favor of “trans genocide.” Concerns about the increasing medicalization of children and young people become construed as “just like what the Nazis did.” Of course, the medicalization and sterilization of a disproportionately high number of young people with autism looks very Nazi-like. Many among this demographic happen to be homosexual—or presumed to be such by their families. Meanwhile, adults who have gone through puberty support “puberty blockers” for these children and young people to “protect trans kids.”9 Widespread state and corporate support for these practices and the punishment of critics seem more like a new tyranny. The popular imagination, with such peculiar corporate support, has created an illusion where there swarm hordes of red-eyed creatures. We hear the nonbelievers have not received appropriate education in the doctrines of the new church. For instance, we, the uneducated, do not understand that girls could only dislike their breasts due to being boys.
Apparently, men shed being a threat simply by saying they are not men but women instead.
A turning point for me had been realizing just how much “trans rights” prioritizes men over women. When it comes to men in women’s prisons, for instance, the men receive the compassion. Activists question how a poor, defenseless “woman”—really, a man—could be placed among men, presumably all predatory in a way the other man could not be. On the one hand, we hear that this one man among men puts him in danger, given how men behave. For placing men among women on the basis of an identity claim, however, we hear that men present no possible danger. Apparently, men shed being a threat simply by saying they are not men but women instead. We have seen how this rationale has worked in the case of Darren Merager at Wi Spa.10 The argument remains that any potential threat to a man by other men in men’s spaces requires women accommodating the man into women’s spaces. Either actual or potential threats to women appear secondary to concerns about men, if even considered. Dismantling protections for women has no benefit for women and benefits men, including those who manipulate the system. Even the women who transition, though often able to “pass” better, would be at risk in men’s prisons.
There was rhetoric, though less pervasive then, equating people who regret transition, including desisters and detransitioners, with “ex-gays.” Usually, the framing emphasized cases of religious conversion experienced by people from “exiting” the “LGBTQ+ community.” While a full treatment would be another essay, addressing this false equivalence matters. Lesbians and gay men have been consistently subjected to forms of medicalization. Such practices have included drugs, the lobotomy, electroconvulsive therapy, and, in from the field of sexual medicine, being prescribed synthetic sex hormones, dating back to the mid-twentieth century. Psychiatry’s war on homosexuality, usually through pharmaceuticals, and the modern gay liberation movement’s response to it have been obscured.
Peter Donoghue, an older gay man, has discussed how his teachers and parents had him assessed by a doctor for “acting more like a girl than a boy.” Here is his account from 2017:
I was born in 1953 in a small village called Batley, West Yorkshire. I went to school at the age of five, and unbeknown to me, we were watched by the teachers, and the teachers told my parents that I was acting more like a girl than a boy. So, I was taken to the doctors, and I was injected with testosterone from five years of age until I was eleven years old. I was also given ECT [electroconvulsive therapy] treatment, where they put the electrodes on your head, and it shakes your brain. They thought, in them days, starting at a young age, it would stop what they thought was an effeminate way of speaking and acting like a boy more than acting like a girl.11
As late as the 1950s, many within the medical profession believed homosexuality to be the result of an endocrinological disorder, treatable by synthetic hormones. One purported “treatment” for homosexuality consisted of trying to “regulate” the “hormone imbalance” in lesbians and gay men. Peer-reviewed medical journals published findings on it. Today, the scientific views that dominated then have been discarded—relatively so, at least. Doctors believed it. Teachers believed it. Parents believed it. What child would disagree with a “cure” to her or his suffering, if only to escape the punishment of atypical behavior? Even adult patients could be persuaded, likely with relative ease, feeling unable to question authority and personally identifying with their self-hatred. Once society believes a group of people will die anyway, considered “life unworthy of life,” virtually anything can be done to the group. The fundamental idea, then, has been to use “the magic of modern medicine” to “normalize” the body in alignment with the presumably “right” sex role. Science of the past seemed to agree in broad consensus on this particular “cure”—until it no longer did.
Modern technology has made slow genocide into a technical marvel.
Why did so many teachers and parents willingly facilitate harm to children under the premise of giving them necessary medical treatment? It would be too easy to declare these teachers and parents hated the children they had medicalized over their possible homosexuality. They believed they were saving their lives. They trusted scientific progress with their children’s best interests, though it facilitated the progressive dehumanization of their children. They had otherwise good intentions. Such interventions very likely cut short the lives of thousands of human beings. What could have been sold as “prevention” for suicide and depression, as the lobotomy had been advertised, could have been a catalyst for death. It now seems unimaginable that a human rights violation of this kind would be perpetrated in plain sight. Modern technology has made slow genocide into a technical marvel.
Read alongside Donoghue’s experience, a trendy support for “puberty blockers” and medical transition seems like a new form of an old harm. It would be false equivalence, then, to equate people in recovery from institutionalized medical violence with “ex-gays.” Transition recovery narratives reveal trauma, often sexual in nature, underlying the desire to be the opposite sex. Some do seek to flee their bodies to escape the site of trauma. Others try to escape their same-sex attraction. Still, others struggle with varying forms of body dysmorphia, with transition as redemption. In Donoghue’s case, his parents, his teachers, and his doctors believed injecting him with testosterone would keep him from “acting more like a girl than a boy.” It was not that he was actually engaging in homosexuality; he was only five years old. It was the very idea that he could “grow up gay” that led his guardians and the authority figures around him to seek preventative “treatment.”
Like religious conversion, medical transition appeals to a “born again” mythos.
Like religious conversion, medical transition appeals to a “born again” mythos. The individual learns that she or he can transcend such earthly constraints of the flesh. Internalizing this concept of transcendence leads the “reborn” to deny the materiality of the body. At every turn, hormonal and surgical interventions remind the believer of the flesh, but faith subordinates all else. Transitioned adults usually remind critics that, yes, they remain terribly aware of their bodies not actually becoming the opposite sex. Such treatments, most concede, result in what they consider alleviation, but there is no true conversion in transition. In recent years, however, increasing numbers of transitioned adults, those who have gone through puberty, insist they actually do change sex. “Trans kids” take “puberty blockers” on the belief that they will truly be able to become the opposite sex—finally, their most “authentic selves,” by pill and procedure. Ironically, this new church has created the ideal conditions for its own abolition, its end in a beginning of contradictions.
I think about why I think what I think and how it all came to be different. The reader may relate. In all likelihood, many others find themselves in a similar position, though paralyzed from speaking—if even thinking—differently. When I hear that line about how I will end up on “the wrong side of history,” I cannot help but find it more than ironic—almost satirical. These new priests object to morality, including moral intelligence, but they accept prepackaged notions of “right” and “wrong.” Their explanation for why they believe what they do usually ends up being some variation of “live and let live.” In the end, however, they cannot totally kill that feeling they may be so “right,” under others’ eyes, that they are wrong for all time. Thinking about it, though, would bring death to delusion. It would all come to be different. That fate terrifies them far more than feeding the children to Moloch. Heretics end up proven right in the end.
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Matilda Joslyn Gage, Woman, Church, and State (Humanity Books, 1893/2002), 97.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, His Religion and Hers (AltaMira Press, 1923/2003), 175.
Janice G. Raymond, “Medicine as Patriarchal Religion,” The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, 7, no. 2 (February 1982): 200. https://doi.org/10.1093/jmp/7.2.197.
Amber Payne, “Rachel Dolezal on Why She Can’t Just Be a White Ally,” NBC News, March 28, 2017, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/ncna738911. See also Rachel Dolezal, with Storms Reback, In Full Color: Finding My Place in a Black and White World (BenBella Books, 2017) and Rebecca Tuvel, “In Defense of Transracialism,” Hypatia, 32, no. 2 (March 2017): 263-278. https://doi.org/10.1111/hypa.12327.
See Janice G. Raymond, The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male (Teachers College Press, 1979/1994) and Janice G. Raymond, Doublethink: A Feminist Challenge to Transgenderism (Spinifex Press, 2021). See also Janice G. Raymond, “Medicine as Patriarchal Religion.”
For examples of things that seemed believable to me as an undergraduate student, see Cristan Williams, “Fact Checking Janice Raymond: The NCHCT Report,” TransAdvocate, September 18, 2014, https://www.transadvocate.com/fact-checking-janice-raymond-the-nchct-report_n_14554.htm. See also Cristan Williams, “Radical Inclusion: Recounting the Trans Inclusive History of Radical Feminism,” Transgender Studies Quarterly (TSQ), 3, nos. 1-2 (2016): 254-258. https://doi.org/10.1215/23289252-3334463.
Jean O’Leary and Bruce Voeller, “Anita Bryant’s Crusade,” The New York Times, June 7, 1977, 35, https://www.nytimes.com/1977/06/07/archives/anita-bryants-crusade.html.
For a recent case of similar woman-hating propaganda invoking a history of anti-Semitic caricature, see Matthew Lodge and Dan Sales, “Oxfam Could Face Charity Commission Probe After J.K. Rowling Cartoon,” Daily Mail, June 8, 2023, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12171955/Oxfam-face-Charity-Commission-probe-cartoon-depicting-JK-Rowling-anti-trans-demon.html.
See Gerald Posner, “The Truth About ‘Puberty Blockers,’” The Wall Street Journal, June 7, 2023, https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-truth-about-puberty-blockers-overdiagnosis-gender-dysphoria-children-933cd8fb.
See Jeremy Lee Quinn and Jason McGahan, “EXCLUSIVE: Transgender Fugitive Who Spurred Wi Spa Riots Bares All,” Los Angeles Magazine, December 19, 2022, https://www.lamag.com/citythinkblog/exclusive-transgender-fugitive-who-spurred-wi-spa-riots-bares-all. In this interview, Merager explains:
I’m very neutral, like non-binary, although I don’t like that word. I’m legally female. But I have facial hair. I have a penis. I have no breasts. I don’t have a feminine voice. I don’t wear makeup or dress up like a female. So imagine you’re a grocery store [clerk] and you’re bagging my groceries and you say, ‘Excuse me, sir…’ I mean, am I supposed to be offended? That’d be ridiculous. How would this person know? But technically, for legal terms, I am she/her. I put ‘female’ on my driver’s license. But I’ve had to struggle my whole life fitting into traditional society.
Publications in support of “trans rights,” especially mainstream outlets, have parroted the narrative of Merager as a “trans woman” who has been subject to “transphobia” and “transmisogyny.” The advocates themselves have sufficiently demonstrated the absurdity of men treating womanhood as a legal fiction to be claimed by word alone. Men speaking their purported “womanhood” into existence happens to be the premise of sex “self-identification” vis-à-vis “gender identity” enshrined in law.
“Being Gay in the 1950s,” ITV News, Facebook, July 27, 2017, https://fb.watch/kWeK3eB3Ga. See also Paul Davies, “Chemicals and Electric Shocks: Being a Gay Man Before Decriminalisation,” ITV News, July 27, 2017, https://www.itv.com/news/2017-07-27/gay-man-on-how-doctors-gave-him-chemicals-and-electric-shocks.
My heretical homie!