Our Boys in ‘The Lost Boys’
Our Boys in ‘The Lost Boys’
Transgenderism and the problems afflicting young men
The Lost Boys: Searching for Manhood (2024)
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy,
But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy;
The Youth, who daily farther from the east
Must travel, still is Nature’s priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended;
At length the Man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day.- William Wordsworth, “Ode,” Poems, in Two Volumes1
Feeling as if one has lost oneself, lacking direction and seeking anything in place of feeling nothing, may be considered a tragedy that produces tragedies. Written by Jennifer Lahl, Kallie Fell, and Gary Powell, produced by the Center for Bioethics and Culture (CBC), The Lost Boys explores narratives from young men harmed by “gender-affirming care.” “I run what I call a recovery group for males who have transitioned or underwent medical transition,” Ritchie Herron says. “In this group, we’ve all opted for something we call ‘recovery,’ rather than ‘detransition,’ because there was no transition; I never went to female, and I’m not going back to male—I never left.” Very untraditionally, I begin this review essay with the end—that is, a view for the future, where survivors of medical violence may find recovery, as much as possible, alongside others like themselves, and live in self-affirming being. The Lost Boys shares the heartbreaking recognitions of transgenderism’s impact on boys and young men and the valuable insights from male survivors living their lives in recovery. A vision of light breaks over much darkness, that lack where one may grow accustomed if left wandering too long.
Today’s Boy, Tomorrow’s Man
A look at boyhood provides an understanding of the formative experiences that lead individuals toward medical transition. The film gives sketches of the men’s boyhoods, which matter to get a portrait of younger male demographics transitioning. Ritchie and Alexander both discuss having late puberties, looking younger than other male peers. Physical differences, being tinier or looking like a child, drive an even greater sense of social difference—being something other than normal, unlike what may be expected. In Ritchie’s case, there was some dress up, he says, but most was “boy stuff,” such as outdoor play. However, by about seven or eight, he explains that he “became obsessed with wanting to be a ballerina,” soon learning that a boy cannot be a ballerina in the way he envisioned. As far as “traditional” gender stereotypes go, even a male ballet dancer would be seen as not masculine, if not homosexual then effeminate—not exhibiting limitingly defined “manliness.”2 By contrast, in Alexander’s case, though he was not “this effeminate gay guy,” he explains, he had differing interests in poetry and music, being “sort of a romantic type.” These narratives indicate sensitivity and expressiveness, joy in the arts and literature, perceived as being atypical—unfortunately, “wrong”—for boys.3
Other narratives, like Torren’s, indicate feeling a sense of not fitting into the image of manhood observed in family members. He says that “the men were just these hardened, blue-collar workers that only talked about cars, beer, hunting.” During boyhood, Torren noticed “these hard-cut gender roles that never got crossed,” these boxes in which he felt unable to fit. He recalls picking up his mother’s purse to help, as her hands were full, and being mocked by a family member telling him “boys don’t carry purses.” Even brief contact with this article of “traditional femininity” appeared to threaten whether a boy could still be a boy. Similarly, Njada, who describes his family life in elementary school as “disconnected,” struggled with fitting into expectations. His father emphasized sports, even when Njada was not interested. From the use of the word “disconnected,” we may think of similar themes in boys’ relationships to their fathers. “There was sort of this sense that being sensitive, being really expressive, was kind of an embarrassing thing,” Njada explains. Unfortunately, this sense of disconnection recurs in men’s reflections on their relationships with their fathers as boys, alienation during their most formative years. Sensitivity and expression have been two elements neglected in the father-son relationship, having at least something to do with this lurking fear of not being seen as manly.
Some boyhood experiences conform, at least to some extent, while still involving stigma over certain perceivable differences. Though Brian, in seventh or eighth grade, “was a pretty good runner,” being athletic, he still experienced bullying. Two boys, he said, would wait for him and throw him “down a ravine,” calling him homosexual slurs. Similarly, Ritchie and Alexander reflect on experiences of bullying from peers. Alexander notes that, early on, he developed a kind of association between sex and death, leading to a negative relationship with his body, especially his genitals. We may consider how the sensitive or expressive boys, those romantic types, may develop along similar lines. In his case, Alexander notes having felt a sense of not being “good enough to be a man,” unable to fulfill the role as it should be, with negative results, “so life would be much easier for me if I was born a woman.”
Pornography and Social Media
Among the men’s narratives in the film, Brian and Njada discuss exposure to pornography as impacting them, and Steven, a father of a trans-identified son, notes the likelihood of it having impacted his son. On consuming pornography from a young age into adulthood, Brian reflects:
I started looking at porn when I was young. Eventually, I got into more obscure pornography, which went from gay porn, then I started to watch transgender porn. But then I discovered this bizarre subgenre of pornography called ‘sissy hypnosis pornography.’ I was able to sort of keep a lid on it while I was going to college. When I graduated from college, that’s when I spiraled out of control.
Brian’s experience corresponds with other men’s accounts regarding online pornography use. In men’s narratives, their reported pornography consumption shifts from more “typical” pornographic representations of sexual intercourse to “obscure” genres like “sissy hypnosis pornography.” Also more simply known as “sissy porn,” this genre, typically associated with transgender pornography, features men being subjected to “forced feminization”—that is, men being “made” into “women” through sexual degradation. Sissy porn not only sexualizes and infantilizes women and girls but also reinforces sexualizing the sensitive man, designating every perceived “sissy” as “failing” at being male and better off “female.”4 The man’s self becomes negated, eclipsed by a sexualized caricature fashioned into yet another mask among masks. He wanders ever more away from a male selfhood not circumscribed by stereotypes, still wedded to gender polarity—except in the opposite direction. Women suffer from men fashioning them into “bimbos” consumed to “embody” what the men, disembodied, buy as “the authentic self.”
Exposure to pornography, namely its effects on how men and boys see women and girls, matters in the analysis of gender. Like Brian, Njada was young when he became exposed to pornography. “At the beginning of puberty,” he says, “I definitely stumbled on pornography and that had just a devastating impact on me in the way that I just was instantly addicted.” Unlike Brian, however, Njada does not discuss the content, or broader genres, of the pornography consumed.
Most recently, in a 2019 paper in the Journal of Clinical Medicine, Rubén de Alarcón et al. have noted the “Triple A” factors apply to online pornography use—content being not only more accessible and more affordable but also users being anonymous.5 Children as young as six years old now access pornography online, and it seems worth considering the wide-ranging impact on child development today.6 The experiences of Brian and Njada in their exposure to pornography from a young age likely represent a wider demographic of males who do not speak about it.
Social media certainly has at least some impact on “trans” identification, as more research has indicated negative impacts on mental health for young people.7 Torren reflects that the popular narratives about medical transition “solving problems” and “saving lives” can be highly seductive. He explains:
You see all of these people transitioning and they just seem happy. You see them on social media. They seem like they they’re saying it’s solved all their problems. I think I knew that it was too good to be true, but I struggled with it. I didn’t know who to turn to.
In recent years, especially, mediated images of medical transition have been skewed in favor of the overwhelmingly happy ending story. The public reaction to any positive coverage of detransitioners indicates denial that undergoing medical transition can be the cause of further physical and mental health issues. Worsened outcomes in health and wellbeing appear mainly attributed to “minority stress,” typically neglecting complications that would intensify mental illness, likely also increasing suicidality. Many have internalized the message that “gender-affirming care” must be “life-saving care,” not really thinking about it but just accepting it as “given.” Like Torren, any young person online, whether female or male, can see a well-marketed, highly seductive technical “fix” to a variety of problems individuals experience. The popular assumption that the “science is settled” is wrong, evident in the gradually deteriorating wall of propaganda. Admitting uncertainty makes the older cracks appear far more noticeable, as the newer ones cannot be so easily hidden, which means there will be more denialism before greater sensibility hits.
Similar to Torren, Alexander notes the role of social media, particularly TikTok. However, he has a valuable critique of the emphasis on children “brainwashed by TikTok.” Are they really brainwashed, Alexander questions, “or are we using it as a scapegoat to ignore a much bigger problem in society?” This problem, he continues, is the development of mental health issues among children and the associated familial problems evident in so many children, now, being “raised by the internet.” I agree with Alexander that social media can become too convenient a scapegoat to avoid engaging deeper issues. It would be too simplistic to argue that platforms “brainwash” young people. Instead, it seems more reasonable to consider that sustained online exposure appears to have some measurable influence, fueled by peers and older “mentors,” evident in the narratives from The Lost Boys.
Patients and the Clinical Domain
With the men’s narratives in The Lost Boys, there are useful and insightful analyses from psychiatrist Az Hakeem and clinical psychotherapist Joe Burgo. Their contributions give the viewer a sketch of the mental health profession and the possibilities in alternative paradigms to “gender-affirming care.” Hakeem and Burgo provide a helpful understanding of concepts otherwise less widely accessible to the majority of viewers.
Rapid-onset gender dysphoria (ROGD) is one concept highlighted in The Lost Boys. Hakeem notes the recent prevalence of ROGD, coined by Lisa Littman in 2018, observed among “kids who have not previously had any inkling or showing any signs of problems with their gender.”8 Before Littman’s study, decades of research on eating disorders have indicated that anorexia nervosa, another form of body dysmorphic disorder (BDD) akin to gender dysphoria, can be influenced by social contagion.9 Most recently, since the COVID-19 pandemic began, there has been a sharp increase among young women and girls presenting with tics resembling Tourette’s—known as “TikTok Tics,” connected with social media interactions among peers.10 Unsurprisingly, there has been denial that gender dysphoria can operate in a similar fashion, as if it must be treated as a medical condition—while, simultaneously, not being a medical condition. Hakeem suggests that ROGD “is not a medical condition,” in the sense that we understand medical conditions, but rather “a youth subculture.” The same can be said of the “pro-ana” and “pro-mia” online communities that have developed in “affirming” eating disorders like anorexia nervosa and bulimia as “identities” for young people. Individuals “affirmed” within these communities lack a self-affirming way of being, caged by others’ perceptions.
“Gender-Affirming Care” as Medical Violence
The Lost Boys presents evidence of “gender-affirming care” as medical violence—medical interventions that harm rather than help patients desperate for any remedy. Generally, most of those supporting “gender-affirming care” are “good” people, at least in the sense that they want to help others live “happy” lives, whatever so-called “happiness” may entail, surgically and chemically. Like patients seeking their “fix,” supporters of “gender-affirming care” desperately want to be on “the right side of history,” not cast into the wastebin of progress. Not questioning authority, however, especially medical authority, most are ignorant of how surgical and hormonal interventions actually impact health and wellbeing. Patients and their families believing in a given medical treatment are not indicative of helpful, much less ethical, practice—as seen in Battey’s operation, among historical examples.
Both Alexander and Ritchie give important accounts of the surgical interventions they underwent, which have had lasting medical complications and impacts on their physical and mental health. Alexander says:
I hated my genitals, but, at the same time, there was also this fear of surgery, in general. Honestly, I think what actually happened is that the more I was on estrogen, the more dysphoric I got. I was thinking, ‘Well, am I a woman enough? At what point am I?’ I was thinking this is this one thing that separates me from other women: They don’t have a penis. I was like, ‘If I do that, I would be able to go to a pool or a beach, I would be able to change in women’s changing rooms—so why not?’ That was one of the biggest reasons why I decided to have the surgery. Then again, I was on pills that were affecting me cognitively in such a negative way. I think the brain fog I was experiencing played a part, too, because I wasn’t thinking clearly. This doctor I was seeing prescribed hormones to me in Norway—I had seen him three times in total. He basically wrote a recommendation letter that I ended up sending to a surgeon in Thailand—and that happened after just three consultations. How can you come to a conclusion that this sort of surgery—life-changing surgery—is the best choice for a patient after talking to the patient three times?
Similar to Alexander, Ritchie reflects:
I’m continuing my gender therapy sessions. It was just all the time constant, constant, constant, constant ‘do you want surgery, do you want surgery, do you want surgery,’ and the psychiatrist was like, ‘You’re established on your hormones. If you don’t want the surgery, we’re going to look to discharge you. I’m now rationalized that I’m just crushing my testicles anyway, and I may as well get it all taken off anyway if from going to be ‘trans’ for life anyway—and it will make us a ‘real’ woman. I already lost the ability to have orgasms and erections anyway because of the hormone treatment. I had the surgery, and everything went wrong, and, before I knew it went wrong, I was regretting it straight away.
The two men’s details of the results of “vaginoplasty,” including Alexander’s use of “absolute massacre” to describe the surgeon’s work, give a vivid picture of it as some of the most brutal sexual surgery inflicted on healthy genital tissue.
Among lesser-known effects, however, we find a valuable discussion of the impact of synthetic sex hormones. Heightened or lowered hormones can have physical and mental impacts that do not appear taken into account in the fixation on the cosmetic aspects of medical transition. Male bodies naturally produce estrogen, in the form of estrone and estradiol, as female bodies produce testosterone in the ovaries, adrenal glands, fat cells, and skin cells. However, an increased estrogen level, beyond typical for the male body, has been associated with depression in males.11 On his experience taking estrogen, Torren reflects:
I would take a small amount of estrogen, and my estrogen would go through the roof. Then my testosterone would tank to almost nothing. You can quickly find out that low testosterone in men can cause depression, anxiety, cloudy thinking—high estrogen in men, same thing: brain fog, depression, anxiety, lack of energy.
On impaired cognitive functioning, Ritchie says:
The brain fog is murderous. You can just be sat here, chatting away, and
then, halfway through, it’s like somebody’s switched off the conversation—and you’re like, ‘What the hell was I just speaking about?’
Considering increased depression following higher estrogen, Brian adds:
I never really felt suicidal or anything till I took estrogen. It didn’t make my life any better. In fact, it made my life worse, because I started to feel really depressed. I think, when I went and saw these gender therapists, a good therapist, I think, would have said, ‘Well, maybe you’re transgender—who knows? But let’s get sober for a while—and then let’s revisit this topic.’ But that’s not what happened.
Read together, the men’s accounts in The Lost Boys resemble other men’s accounts of worsened outcomes following transition—including from Andrea Long Chu’s 2018 op-ed in The New York Times titled “Surgery, Hormones, But Not Happiness.” Available online as “My New Vagina Won’t Make Me Happy,” his piece argues that, even if physical and mental health and wellbeing become worsened, concerns are bigotry, of course—and, ultimately, people should be given whatever they desire, including medically, even if they suffer more. “I was not suicidal before hormones,” Chu writes. “Now I often am.” The fact that medical transition leads to further physical and mental health complications, he argues, is not a reason to place any restrictions on this object of desire. “Transition doesn’t have to make me happy for me to want it,” he adds. “Left to their own devices, people will rarely pursue what makes them feel good in the long term.”12 Brain fog is murderous. We may wonder to what extent the symptoms of obstructed thinking, as described by the men in The Lost Boys, influence the nihilistic rhetoric of transgender rights activism—like a pharmaceutical doomsday cult.
“Traditional Masculinity” and What It Means to Be a Man
Alongside the analyses from Hakeem and Burgo, comedy writer Graham Linehan provides insightful thoughts about young men today. Linehan makes a valuable point that, as more detransitioners come forward, including men, there will be more dialogue about harm arising from “gender-affirming care.” I especially find it valuable how The Lost Boys links the issue of being online with how young men, like young women, undoubtedly see themselves through others’ eyes. Social media has all of the qualities of the panopticon, except the prison and its numerous enforcers, with that feeling of surveillance, virtually surround us in everyday life. Online, we find it appearing like we have no being except in others’ eyes, and there seems to be no escape but attempting to escape the self. I have become inclined toward a prohibition of social media for children, with parents being more internet literate and engaged in their children’s online activity—and even restrictions advised for adult users. Social media is a glorified torture device, with pornography working hand in glove.
There is a point, however, that I think could have been explored more critically in the film: “traditional masculinity.” It repeatedly appears in the commentaries by Hakeem, Burgo, and Linehan. On the popular use of “toxic masculinity” in objection to what may be considered “traditional masculinity,” Hakeem, for instance, remarks:
Boys aren’t allowed to be boys. Any signs that a boy has of being male and masculine, then it’s ‘toxic,’ and they’re told that it’s unacceptable. It is strange. It’s strange that our society is, in the background, unconsciously, punishing or looking down upon masculinity in favor of a more asexual masculinity.
Like Hakeem, Burgo remarks on the cultural discourse surrounding “toxic masculinity.” “I don’t think that the strategy that we’ve adopted as a society, which is shame them, shame them for their innate natures—I don’t think that’s an effective strategy,” he says. I think it’s led to a lot of this trans identification.” On boys and “traditional masculinity,” Burgo says:
Pretty much all the messaging they’ve been given during grade school and growing up, in media, from their families, from their teachers, everywhere, is that traditional men are really bad and that men need to be more like women. If you look at the American Psychological Association’s guidelines for working with men and boys, they basically pathologize traditional masculinity. These boys grow up feeling like being a man is awful.
Similar to Hakeem and Burgo, more related to male expression, Linehan observes:
There is obviously a problem with young men, and part of the problem is that the things they naturally find funny, the things they naturally find interesting, the things they naturally find sexy have all been problematized. They’re being made to feel like there’s something wrong with all these things, these very natural things they’re feeling. On top of that, you have an increasingly censorious kind of atmosphere, where they really can’t say what they want to say. […] I think that young men are probably in a place where they just feel they’re being monitored, they have to watch everything they say, and they can’t really be themselves.
These points are worth reflection. I agree that increasingly popular usage of “toxic masculinity,” repeated endlessly online in forums and blogs, has been unhelpful and counterproductive. Like notions about all white people being racist, similar ones about all men being sexist have effectively located oppression in the individual rather than society, which, as Burgo notes, has led to unhealthy degrees of shame. With the rise of therapy as a way of life, individual psyches rather than social institutions have become a fixation, where oppression takes the form of “original sin.” I think of Andy Chu writing “I Am a Racist,” in 2013, about his guilt over his sex and his race, transitioning into Andrea Long Chu’s Females, in 2019, asserting, “Everyone is female, and everyone hates it.”13 Notions of “male guilt” and “white guilt” seem to be a great source of individual neurotic obsession—at the expense of positive social change. Mainly white middle-class heterosexual males claiming to be “women” and “lesbians” may be read as them moving the pieces—or renaming them—to reassert perceivably lost status.
When young men identify as “trans,” Burgo says, “they invest so much in their ‘trans’ identities and ‘coming out’ that they kind of neglect—I think, deliberately—the other chores of adolescence.” These, he explains, include “transition into adulthood, to figure out how you’re going to be an adult, who you are as a person, what your career path is going to be, how you’re going to make a living.” Burgo further elaborates:
For many people, trans-identification represents exactly this kind of stultifying psychic retreat. Teens in my practice often contemplate their future transition as if it will be a major achievement, the most important thing they’ll ever do, meanwhile neglecting other important questions about their future—like which career path to choose and how to earn a living. Behind this fantasy, I sense their dread of the demands and responsibilities that will come with adulthood.14
Instead of engaging the world and others, one withdraws into a negation of the self. “Trans” identity as escaping the self presents a possible “new” life, with all manner of possibilities—or so one may be misled to believe, if seduced by the extensive marketing. For the men in Burgo’s practice, what seems most valuable to the men’s “growth and development,” he explains, is them “coming to terms with being a man and finding ways to feel masculine in a positive way.”15
A similar kind of neglect to being human, not just being an adult, can be observed among men who fixate on being “masculine,” in negative ways, though most do not take up “trans” identities. The concept of “traditional masculinity” would be worth defining—and reconsidering for its past limitations for men and boys. Importantly, Burgo criticizes liberal gender ideology, exemplified in transgenderism, as having “brought us back to very regressive views of what it means to be a boy and a girl.” Thinking about it, however, we never truly moved past regressive views of masculinity and femininity. Burgo is right to note the predatory men online, usually in forums and chatrooms, who become, in the most perverse sense, boys’ “mentors.” Such men encourage the boys to dress in a “feminine,” sexualized fashion and send nude pictures of their “feminized” bodies, the male child’s body tailored for adult male consumption. Concepts of “femininity” and “masculinity” have become interwoven with pornography, reinforcing gender as what Gerda Lerner terms “a costume, a mask, a straitjacket in which men and women dance their unequal dance.”16 Men being sexually attracted to women seems quite natural, at least for most of the male population, but pornography confounds nature, most evident in men’s “forced feminization.” They do not become “more like women,” so it seems, but rather more like men’s ideas of women, suffering from how men distorting women’s humanity distorts men’s humanity.
Phrases like “be a man” or “man up” have represented traditional masculine dogmas asserting being “masculine” as the prerequisite to being male. “Failing” at being masculine, even having differing interests, becomes “failing” at being male. With Burgo’s analysis of “autogynephilia” as psychic retreat, we may observe men perceiving a loss of agency and reasserting agency through a “trans” identity. The irony throughout many “trans” narratives, like Chu’s mentioned above, is a professed lack of agency rather than its gain, an elaborate denial of it as psychic retreat to escape the self. “Sissy porn did make me trans,” Chu writes of his identity being “nonconsensual,” adding, “Wanting to be a woman was something that descended upon me, like a tongue of fire, or an infection.”17
In my life, my father set a standard of manhood defined by caring for others’ welfare, extended to other animals, persevering in hard but ethical labor, and respecting women and men alike in one’s work. Looking back, I can see the definition of “masculinity,” for men in our household, was not about stereotypes but about virtues, which comes to be revealed as human virtues. A man’s careful regard for others becomes what matters to male selfhood, not his appearance or his interests. From this understanding, I developed a sense of self-affirming being. Over time, however, I learned there were varying definitions of “masculinity,” even “traditional masculinity.” Since the later nineteenth century, for instance, popular definitions have emphasized the man should maintain a mask against the appearance of sensitivity and expressiveness. This fear has to do with being perceived as not being “masculine” in ways deemed culturally desirable for males. Under these conditions, it makes sense for men to exhibit a phobic reaction to perceived “femininity.” Men can become so obsessed with looking manly that it makes them mad.
Early sexological and psychiatric literature, like James Foster Scott’s The Sexual Instincts: Its Uses and Dangers as Affecting Hereditary and Morals (1898), pathologized the “girlish boy.” On boyhood, Scott asked how to keep the boy away from “sexual matters.” Answering his own question, he replied, “No, it is impossible, unless he is reared up as a delicate, soft-skinned girlish boy, for such the danger is even greater than for the boy of the street.” This perspective was not isolated to Scott but had more widespread currency among medical professionals of the late-nineteenth century into the twentieth century. The sensitive boy came to be equated with a potential for sexual perversion. Connected with this view, Scott viewed girls “being tom-boys” and boys “playing girlish games” as “evils of a specially dangerous tendency,” which necessitated intervention if the children were to grow up sexually “normal.” “Boys should be encouraged to excel in manly sports—to ride, row, swim, etc.; to have deep chests and hard muscles, to play hard and to study hard,” he wrote. “An athletic boy will hardly fall into great harm, and to the discipline of his muscles there is added a still greater discipline to his mind, and character, and plus, and inflexibility and manliness.” As Claudia Nelson notes in her 1989 survey of Victorian literature on ideals of manliness for boys, “The key to the distinction between normal and abnormal was often effeminacy.”18 Boys unfit for “manliness” and girls unfit for their corresponding “womanliness,” both states defined by sexual antagonism, presented a “problem” for the medical profession—as such children do today.19
From the Past, Into the Future
Men like Alexander, Brian, Njada, Ritchie, and Torren, may well disturb society from its stagnancy to rethink what it makes of its man, of woman born, her flesh of his, yet society’s child. Listening to survivors in The Lost Boys, thoughtful men in recovery, talk about their struggle toward selfhood, I cannot help but hear echoes from the past—not only decades ago but accounts from the nineteenth century. There have been similar fears of sensitivity and expression among men and boys documented, which have engendered a kind of malady for the male sex. In 1981, The Hite Report on Male Sexuality, from Shere Hite, included perspectives from men describing feeling alienated, disconnected from others. Such accounts included, as seen in The Lost Boys, a sense of inability to establish a self-affirming being. In her concluding analysis for the section, Hite wrote:
Many men today—men of every age, not just younger men—are privately anguished over how to define their own masculinity, what it means to be a man. The majority feel an enormous amount of pressure, anger, and frustration in their lives, but usually focus on women as the cause of it, rather than the values of the society we live in. Most men, also, feel that they cannot talk to other men about their frustrations with ‘masculinity’—because to do so might make them look less ‘masculine’ to other men, as if they couldn’t ‘make it’ as a man.20
These words apply to the present as they did to the past, indicating a stagnancy that seems rarely, if ever, acknowledged in discussions of how men and boys have come to understand what it means to be a man. Young men’s flight from manhood into “womanhood,” conveniently through the artifice of man-made “femininity,” seems to reproduce the focus on women as the cause. Transitioning from “sex change” to alternative paradigms, one finds social change neglected, seeing men and boys still wearing masks, dancing “new” versions of that same old unequal dance.
Not knowing the past, one can almost endlessly repeat its mistakes, falling into the most avoidable traps. Historically, boyhood has been far from idyllic, painfully evident in The Lost Boys. Critics in our time overlook how much of the nineteenth century has remained with us, where boyhood then—as now—had been considered naturally savage and in need of civilizing, a powerful cultural view that enforced gender.21 The Lost Boys illustrates medicalization as discipline against disorder, what Abigail Bray terms chemical control.22 Disciplining children has consisted of caning and flogging in the past, followed by pills and surgeries into the present. Issues surrounding boys’ development fell under “the boy problem,” described in 1895 as “one of the most perplexing with which the church, and general society also, has to deal.”23 “The boy problem” has been no more solved now than it was then. Modern commentaries on “the war against boys” and “the boy crisis,” however, miss how the past reveals the present. In 1875, Elizabeth Cady Stanton gave a speech titled “Our Boys,” in which she advised:
We must not let the haunts of vice be the only well-lighted, attractive places on our streets. […] Far more attention should be paid to the cultivation of their artistic and aesthetic tastes and to what may be called the spiritual and affectional side of their natures, that most necessary to the happiness of home life that best fits them for the duties of sons, brothers, husbands, fathers. […] If we would train our sons more in what are called the ‘feminine’ virtues and accomplishments, and our daughters more in the healthy outdoor exercises and the ‘masculine’ virtues of self-control and self-dependence, they would be equally improved and happier for the imitation of what is best in each other.24
More than a hundred years have passed, technology has advanced, fashions have changed—but little has moved, and fashionable nonsense dominates. No longer just outside, today’s haunts of vice can be found through boys’ access to online spaces, possessing their attention and becoming an obsession, all by the phones in their hands. For the majority of boys, the aesthetic and the artistic, their sensitivity and expressiveness, have yet to be cultivated in the way that Stanton advised. On the contrary, these interests have been disfigured rather than stimulated to best promote our boys’ health and wellbeing—physically, mentally, and spiritually. Offered stereotypes in place of virtues, boys have not imitated what is best in girls. Indeed, they continued to suffer by repressing their deeper romantic or aesthetic sensibilities to the point of illness. Influencing technology and fashion, modern pornography has served to deepen the sexual alienation afflicting male sexual being, a malady that can be traced back to nineteenth-century gender ideology.
The Lost Boys should be viewed to gain a more detailed look into what boys and young men experience today, as the man perceived as “unmanly” now appears symbolically—and then chemically and surgically—excluded from manhood. Where the sensitive boy of the nineteenth century would have obsessed himself into sickness over not living up to manliness, the sensitive boy today finds himself made into a eunuch. “No longer is the punishment of unruly school children administered by the school,” Bray explains, “it is decentralised and outsourced to a pharmaceutical corporation that works through the school psychologist and other judges of normality.”25 For centuries, it seems that society has worn its children ill, girls and boys alike suffering from the cane to the pill. Perhaps the lost boys will be found—or, rather, find themselves, really finding themselves—sooner rather than later.
The Lost Boys is part of a trilogy of films on how “gender-affirming care” impacts children and young adults experiencing forms of body dysmorphia. In 2021, Trans Mission: What’s the Rush to Reassign Gender? investigated the medical ethics—or, rather, the lack thereof—in subjecting children to so-called “puberty blockers” and synthetic sex hormones. Afterward, in 2022, The Detransition Diaries: Saving Our Sisters documented the stories of three young women who underwent medical transitioning and have been recovering from medical violence. Boys’ and men’s experiences with synthetic sex hormones and sexual surgery indicate similar themes of shame and dissociation nevertheless distinct from those shared by girls and women. Together, these films matter in giving us a fuller understanding of why people, especially young ones, feel bodily dissociation and become “ideal” for synthetic sex identities.
Trans Mission: What’s the Rush to Reassign Gender? (2021)
The Detransition Diaries: Saving Our Sisters (2022)
The Detransition Diaries matters in doing what Lahl and Fell have done in their documentaries: share others’ narratives, humanizing experiences of recovery from dehumanizing conditions, in hope that society learns and changes its course.
For more details on the book, see the following link to the Ignatius Press website:
https://ignatius.com/the-detransition-diaries-ddp
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William Wordsworth, “Ode,” in Wordsworth’s Poems of 1807, ed. Alun R. Jones (London: Macmillan, 1987), 134-135.
See Helen Clegg, Helen Owton, and Jacquelyn Allen-Collinson, “Challenging Conceptions of Gender: UK Dance Teachers’ Perceptions of Boys and Girls in the Ballet Studio,” Research in Dance Education 19, no. 2 (2018): 128-39. https://doi.org/10.1080/14647893.2017.1391194. See also Kelly Lynn Mulvey and Melanie Killen, “Challenging Gender Stereotypes: Resistance and Exclusion,” Child Development 86, no. 3 (2015): 681-694. https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.12317.
See Susan Lagaert, Mieke Van Houtte, and Henk Roose, “Engendering Culture: The Relationship of Gender Identity and Pressure for Gender Conformity with Adolescents’ Interests in the Arts and Literature,” Sex Roles 77, nos. 7-8 (2017): 482-495. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11199-017-0738-y.
See Genevieve Gluck, “Why Isn’t Anyone Talking About the Influence of Porn on the Trans Trend?,” Feminist Current, November 29, 2020, https://www.feministcurrent.com/2020/11/29/why-isnt-anyone-talking-about-the-influence-of-porn-on-the-trans-trend. See also Genevieve Gluck, “The Pornographic Roots of Gender Ideology,” spiked, November 23, 2022, https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/11/23/the-pornographic-roots-of-gender-ideology.
Rubén de Alarcón, Javier I. de la Iglesia, Nerea M. Casado, and Angel L. Montejo, “Online Porn Addiction: What We Know and What We Don’t—A Systematic Review,” Journal of Clinical Medicine 8, no. 1 (2019): 2, 11. https://doi.org/10.3390/jcm8010091. See also Alvin Cooper, Coralie R Scherer, Sylvain C Boies, and Barry L Gordon, “Sexuality on the Internet: From Sexual Exploration to Pathological Expression,” Professional Psychology 30, no. 2 (1999): 154-164. https://doi.org/10.1037/0735-7028.30.2.154.
See Abbey Wright, “Too Much Too Young: I Talked to 10,000 Children About Pornography. Here Are 10 Things I Learned,” The Guardian, September 13, 2023, https://theguardian.com/society/2023/sep/13/adults-are-terrified-of-talking-to-us-about-it-10-things-i-learned-from-children-about-pornography.
See Kira E. Riehm, Kenneth A. Feder, Kayla N. Tormohlen, et al., “Associations Between Time Spent Using Social Media and Internalizing and Externalizing Problems Among US Youth,” JAMA Psychiatry 76, no. 12 (December 2019): 1266-1273. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2019.2325. See also Erika Edwards and Hallie Jackson, “Social Media Is Driving Teen Mental Health Crisis, Surgeon General Warns,” NBC News, May 23, 2023, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna85575.
See Lisa Littman, “Parent Reports of Adolescents and Young Adults Perceived to Show Signs of a Rapid Onset of Gender Dysphoria,” PloS one 13, no. 8 (2018): e0202330-e0202330. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0202330. See also Lisa Littman, “Individuals Treated for Gender Dysphoria with Medical and/or Surgical Transition Who Subsequently Detransitioned: A Survey of 100 Detransitioners,” Archives of Sexual Behavior 50, no. 8 (2021): 3353-3369. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-021-02163-w.
See Stephen Allison, Megan Warin, and Tarun Bastiampillai, “Anorexia Nervosa and Social Contagion: Clinical Implications,” Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry 48, no. 2 (February 2014): 116-120. https://doi.org/10.1177/0004867413502092. See also Valerie L. Forman-Hoffman and Cassie L. Cunningham, “Geographical Clustering of Eating Disordered Behaviors in U.S. High School Students,” The International Journal of Eating Disorders 41, no. 3 (April 2008): 209-214. https://doi.org/10.1002/eat.20491.
Robert Bartholomew, “The Girls Who Caught Tourette’s from TikTok,” Psychology Today, October 6, 2021, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/its-catching/202110/the-girls-who-caught-tourettes-tiktok. See also Isobel Heyman, Holan Liang, and Tammy Hedderly, “COVID-19 Related Increase in Childhood Tics and Tic-Like Attacks,” Archives of Disease in Childhood 106, no. 5 (2021): 420-421. https://doi.org/10.1136/archdischild-2021-321748.
See Stanikova Daniela, Tobias Luck, Yoon Ju Bae, et al., “Increased Estrogen Level Can Be Associated with Depression in Males,” Psychoneuroendocrinology 87 (January 2018): 196-203. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.psyneuen.2017.10.025.
Andrea Long Chu, “Surgery, Hormones, But Not Happiness,” The New York Times, November 25, 2018, SR7. See also Andrea Long Chu, “My New Vagina Won’t Make Me Happy,” The New York Times, November 24, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/24/opinion/sunday/vaginoplasty-transgender-medicine.html.
Andy Chu, “I Am a Racist,” The Chronicle, February 11, 2013, https://www.dukechronicle.com/article/2013/02/i-am-racist. See also Blake Smith, “The Long Goodbye,” Tablet, April 13, 2023, https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/the-long-goodbye-andrea-long-chu. Andrea Long Chu, Females (New York: Verso, 2019), 35.
Joseph Burgo, “Sympathy for the Devil: Autogynephilia as Psychic Retreat,” Reality’s Last Stand, January 31, 2024, https://www.realityslaststand.com/sympathy-for-the-devil-autogynephilia.
Burgo, “Sympathy for the Devil.”
Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986/1987), 238.
Chu, Females, 79.
Claudia Nelson, “Sex and the Single Boy: Ideals of Manliness and Sexuality in Victorian Literature for Boys,” Victorian Studies 32, no. 4 (Summer 1989): 547.
James Foster Scott, The Sexual Instinct: Its Use and Dangers as Affecting Heredity and Morals, 3rd ed. (Chicago: Login Brothers, 1898/1930), 430-431. See also Nelson, “Sex and the Single Boy.”
Shere Hite, The Hite Report on Male Sexuality (New York: Ballantine Books, 1981/1982), 84.
See Ken Parille, Boys at Home: Discipline, Masculinity, and ‘The Boy-Problem’ in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 2009), 24-25, 48-50.
See Abigail Bray, “Chemical-Control™®: From the Cane to the Pill,” in Deleuze and New Technology, ed. Mark Poster and David Savat (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), 82-103.
“Notes and Comments,” The Advocate of Peace 57, no. 10 (October 1895): 231.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “Our Boys,” 1875, ms., 54, 58-59, 61, Elizabeth Cady Stanton Papers: Speeches and Writings, 1848-1902, Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/item/mss412100087. See Lisa S. Hogan and J. Michael Hogan, “Feminine Virtue and Practical Wisdom: Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s ‘Our Boys,’” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 6, no. 3 (Fall 2003): 415-435. See also Tracy A. Thomas, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the Feminist Foundations of Family Law (New York: New York University Press, 2016), 204-206.
Bray, 90.